Marketing Data: The Ultimate Guide for 2023

Even before the rise of digital marketing, companies were accumulating event attendees or survey applicants’ data. And when everything moved online, there’s even more marketing data that can be collected and measured.

Accurate, clean and insightful data is a key component of successful business growth. Ultimately, collecting clear data and making data-driven decisions should be a number one priority for all new-age marketing professionals.

Today’s article will take a deeper look at marketing data’s aggregation, analysis, and how insights can favor both the marketer and the business.

Marketing data fundamentals

Marketing data is the information extracted from various touchpoints and interactions between the customer and the brand. The aggregated data drives marketing analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of any marketing campaign and justify the ROI (return on investment) of these campaigns.

Marketing data is machine-readable information extracted from various touchpoints and interactions between the customer and the brand. The data is collected from company-level and public sources.

The private sources are also known as company-level sources for marketing data extraction, and they are:

• Websites where the company and business information can be searched for and found online.
• Company website analytics that showcases the data on visitors of the business’s website.
• Advertisement-gathered data sources, such as Facebook or Google Ads, allow marketers to view the performance data of the advertising campaigns.
• Social media profiles where brands and individuals create information about themselves available to others. Social Media marketing is one of the most popular marketing tactics that allows reaching a brand's target audience for relatively low costs and extracting performance data.

Interesting fact: Statista found that in the B2B industry, LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform for data collection.

• Online content that is published and is available free-to-view or read. For example, blogs, videos, podcasts, webinars.

The public sources for marketing data collection are:

• Pay-walled content that requires visitors to pay to access the content.
• Market intelligence software that provides industry-specific information on companies, sectors and supply demands.
• DaaS (data as a service) or companies that are managing their databases and making the marketing data available on subscription.
• Public surveys are conducted by the commission for businesses to find out the competitive landscape, market demand, customer satisfaction and behavior and make data-driven insights.

Extra tip: If you are not familiar with marketing data extraction, we recommend using reporting tools. Reporting tools will automatically gather all of the marketing data from different sources, clean and visualize it. By using data monitoring tools, marketers can cut time on routine tasks, avoid critical mistakes, improve marketing strategy and even sell easy-to-understand visual reports as an add-on feature for clients.

Types of marketing data

Five types of marketing data can be collected and used for marketing purposes:

• Demographic data, including personal and geographic attributes such as user’s age, name, email address, phone number, etc.
• Technographic data refers to the technologies that individual prospects or companies use, such as the equipment list and usage time.
• Firmographic metrics usually refer to the information about the businesses. This type of data may include company name, industry, number of employees, HQ location.
• Chronographic or event-based metrics indicate the events that impact individuals, companies or industries. For example, a person starts to work at a new company or the company moves to a new location.
• Intent marketing data refers to the measurement of online users’ behavior, for example, where they go and what they interact with online. Intent data’s purpose is to learn and predict what the user will do next. It also allows the company to indicate when a target audience has the strongest intention to make a purchase.

Intent data is split into two categories — first-party and third-party. First-party marketing data is the information the business collects about the users from its platform or service. The information gathered from other data providers such as search engines and social media platforms is referred to as third-party intent data.

Marketing data automation

Finding how to deal with big amounts of marketing data can be challenging. However, there are tools that make marketing data gathering, aggregation, and analysis easier and less labor-intensive.

One of the ways to handle large amounts of data is to use a marketing reporting tool. The reporting tool automatically gathers all marketing data from different channels and allows marketers to build a visual report on the campaigns’ performance.

The reports can be built with pre-built widgets and templates and automatically sent to the client’s email inbox at the selected frequency — daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

As mentioned earlier  — the visual and easy-to-digest reports can be provided as a premium service to the agency’s clients. Tools like Whatagraph allows marketers to cut time on routine marketing data tasks and effortlessly automate and send easy-to-digest reports with just a few clicks of a button.

How can marketing data benefit your business?

After understanding the marketing data fundamentals and automation, marketers need to focus on data-driven insights. Here are a few examples of how the marketing data can benefit the business:

• Total addressable market calculation. When the business is developing a new product or service, it’s important to know the target market where the product will be sold. Data-driven insights can answer valuable questions, such as how many potential customers are available, what their interests are, or where they are based.
• Finding the ideal customers. Marketing and sales data work together to help identify the company’s ICP (ideal customer profile). Identifying ICP can help understand which customers can generate the most benefit for the business.
• Understanding what is working and what’s not. Data-driven marketing helps marketers identify specific content that is leading users through the sales funnel. Marketing data allows seeing what channels and campaigns are performing well and which marketing efforts could be improved.
• Providing a better customer experience. Insights made from marketing data allow improving the product or service to better suit customer’s needs. Customer satisfaction surveys or focus groups can share feedback on where the product or service development team should focus next.
• Increasing opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling. Data-driven marketing can help businesses to get insights on how to move potential customers through the sales funnel quicker and more cost-efficiently. Additionally, data can help companies see untapped opportunities for cross-selling throughout the sales funnel they may not have noticed before. After purchase, data can help generate ideas on how to keep customers engaged post-sale.

Bottom line

It’s important to remember — it’s all about the accuracy and volume of the data. The bigger the company, the more data it needs to consume to generate valuable insights. Many marketers think that they need to do analytics only once and use the collected marketing data forever. The truth is that marketing is an ever-changing landscape, so is marketing data.

Professionals must measure and analyze metrics constantly and adjust the marketing strategy according to data-driven insights. As The Economist called data the oil of the new age, learning how to extract and leverage it can be overwhelming at first. However, mastered data analytics allows professionals to scale their businesses successfully and always stay ahead of the competition.