5 Data Strategies to Acquire New Customers
Kick Off Your Data-Driven Marketing Engine
Today, you use data for probably several parts of GTM, i.e., selecting a market to go after, choosing the best version of an ad copy, using predictive analytics in retargeting, etc. But data can help you more than simpler tasks. Here are five easy ways to leverage data to acquire new customers.
1. Customer Data: If you are a transaction-heavy SaaS company with over 100 customers, you are already sitting on a gold mine. You can turn the data of your customer’s product usage into marketing fuel. To acquire new customers, you can analyze the data and find these unique and exciting usage insights that no other company has. One great example is Gong’s frequent sharing of sales best practices fed by its large customer base, i.e., how many sales reps should attend a sales call for a higher chance of closing a deal. They have so much data that they create insights from minuscule details. In this example below, the Gong data tells that a top sales rep should pause 5x more than average reps.
2. Unique Research Reports: If you don’t have large customer data sets or cannot anonymize them, you need to create your own data. Based on your industry, you can generate unique data-driven insights that prospects would enjoy. At Boomerang Commerce (dynamic price optimizations), every month, we focussed on a retail category, picked the top 5 retailers in that category and reported them by price and assortment competitiveness using a basket of 1,500 items. Similarly, at Netomi (AI for customer support), we frequently analyze and publish the companies’ support competitiveness using our made-up metric: SPI. In both cases, not only were we able to acquire customers using data-driven research reports, but also we received significant interest from the media.
3. Comprehensive Experiments: I bet nobody disagrees with the benefits of multivariate testing. However, most people use it to a limited extent, i.e., selecting the best version of an email copy. Experimentation can and should also be applied in many other parts of your business. If you want to kick off field marketing but don’t know which channel would perform better, test between a sponsored executive dinner and a trade show and compare their ROIs. You can apply this approach even when hiring, especially now it’s the employers’ market. Let’s say you have one BDR headcount. Instead of hiring one BDR FT, hire two for three months on contract and check out their results before offering the winner the FT job. I have talked about the importance of experimentation in leadership during my chat with Nils Vinje.
4. Prospect Surveys: One of the easiest ways to create unique data to acquire new customers is simply by surveying your prospects and sharing the findings with a larger group. If you sell to HR professionals, you can easily target 500 HR execs, ask ten questions and visually share your results and insights. There are various survey tools, but for starters, you can use free Google Forms to ask questions to a particular group. If executed well, the survey results will be informative for your persona, therefore, will be very lucrative for you.
5. Listicles: In my experience, one of our highest ROI-positive SEO initiatives has been listicles: analyzing a large data set and listing the most relevant items. As long as you know your target keywords, you can list certain features, products, or even companies in a good old bullet-point format. This chatbot vendors blog post has been our all-time most visited blog page at Netomi. Search engines love listicles and reward you accordingly. Furthermore, your readers will appreciate easy-to-follow, easy-to-digest listicles.
Data is gold; if you use it wisely, you’ll be golden!
