How to Leverage Marketing Data to Make Smarter Product Decisions
Providing customers with a great product experience isn’t always easy. Every decision you make throughout the product-development process has a direct impact on your ability to meet or exceed customers’ expectations. Using marketing data to inform vital product decisions ensures that you’re always heading in the right direction.
Whenever someone interacts with your brand, they’re giving you an opportunity to learn more about them. The content they engage with provides insights into their interests and preferences. Their activity on your website hints at patterns in behavior. Understanding how customers perceive your product, the market, and your company’s place in it is the key to building the types of products they want to see.
Getting to the core of customers’ needs is the basis of a winning product experience. Your product has to solve a very real problem for customers—not until you do that can you get the type of engagement necessary to move your team closer to your business goals. When you know how you use your marketing data to learn more about customers, you’re not just getting closer to understanding these needs but also setting your team up for success.
6 Types of Marketing Data to Inform Your Product Roadmap
Every time someone interacts with your company, it has the potential to tell you something. Whenever you read a blog article, sign up for a mailing list, or leave a review of another product online, that’s an additional data point that companies can track. Being able to discern what types of data are truly valuable for your team is the first step toward using that information to make smarter decisions.
Here are the six types of marketing data you can use to inform your product roadmap:
- Customer data: This is some of the most valuable marketing data you have. It is your customer’s personal identifying information, such as their name, contact details, and account status. Use it to build out buyer personas based on the real people using your service.
- Market research: This helps you identify your company’s position in the market and includes general industry trends, tools and alternatives, pricing, and product offering. Market research helps you understand customer expectations and preferences, which you can use to find your place.
- Competitor analysis: This is your understanding of the products and services customers could use instead of your own. Competitor analysis takes market research a level deeper by looking at pricing models, product reviews, and marketing strategy. Use it to help your product truly stand out from the rest.
- Marketing metrics: This is how you gauge the overall success of your marketing campaigns. These key performance indicators (KPIs), such as conversion rate, keyword rankings, website traffic, and acquisition costs, tell you a lot about how customers perceive your product in the market.
- Transaction and purchase history: These are aspects of customer data, but with a slightly different value to your team. This data tells you how effective your pricing and product strategy are at connecting with the perceived value of your product in the market. It also shows how product decisions affect your business goals.
- Customer interactions: Direct conversations with customers, whether it’s through sales, support, or social media, tell you a lot about how people feel about your product. Use it to add context and insight to your product strategy that highlights the real-world effect of your strategy on the customer experience.
Collecting this marketing data makes it much easier to surface opportunities for your product team to investigate and make smarter decisions for any upcoming release.
Use Marketing Data to Understand Your Customers
Marketing data helps you build a comprehensive picture of who your customers really are. Use that understanding to build out realistic buyer personas, predict market trends, and get to the bottom of what your customers value.
Customers interact with your product across a number of different touch points in their journey from awareness to purchase, and finally to advocacy. When you use that data to make decisions for your company, it makes building a targeted product strategy simple.
Each step along the way provides valuable insight into how people engage with your product.
The customer’s or buyer’s journey
Use this journey to visualize the way customers interact with your product. This makes it easy to see the impact of your product on the customer experience and provides a framework for targeting people at different stages with the right kind of product.
Let’s say your company provides email marketing software for small businesses and only allows single-user log-ins for accounts. Over the past few months, you’ve seen an increase in customer requests for the ability to add an additional user. Many of these customers cite a recent feature update to your main competitor’s platform as their reason for reaching out. Digging into these customer interactions, your competitor analysis, and your market research helps validate the idea that you need this functionality as well.
Reviewing this marketing data tells you what customers actually want from this functionality. And that makes it easy to build a business case for creating a new feature.
Looking back at your customer data and buyer personas tells you which types of customers have asked about the feature. It also helps you identify accounts that log in from different IP addresses or have multiple points of contact in their contact details. All of these people could realistically be interested in learning more about multiuser access. So when you roll out the feature to current customers, you’ll be able to pair the release with a targeted distribution plan.
Knowing more about your customers also helps you showcase what they find truly valuable about your product, making it easier to create engaging marketing content.
Gain Insights to Refine Your Positioning
Positioning your new product or feature correctly is the key to increasing engagement with your releases. Finding your place in the market is much easier when you understand the factors that affect customers’ perception of your company. Marketing data gives you the ability to map out specific areas of opportunity for your product and learn more about how competitors present themselves.
The goal is to communicate your product’s unique value for potential customers, so understanding what they think is paramount. Being able to speak to that value is the key to making your product stand out from the competition.
Marketing data is your way to tell a compelling story about your product that resonates with potential customers. Let’s see how your marketing data helps nail down the positioning for multiuser account access.
Based on your marketing research and competitor analysis, the most likely use case is for enterprise customers, as opposed to smaller teams. These types of customer data tell you the following:
- How many enterprise businesses are in your market
- What solutions they use
- How your competitors position the product
Determining those things helps you validate important product decisions before you even start with the active development process. Marketing data tells you how many potential customers you have, who would benefit from the product, what other needs they have, and how they engage with your company already. This saves time and resources for your team by taking any guesswork out of the product-development process.
And as markets evolve, you’ll know when to change along with them or when it makes more sense to hold your ground. Being able to clearly and consistently showcase value is what underpins product positioning.
Learn from Every Product Release
Whenever you release a product, it changes how customers and prospects engage with your company. Marketing data helps you refine the product development and release process to ensure the best possible experience for everyone involved.
Your marketing metrics, customer data, and interaction history show the effect of each release and how it changes your product’s perceived value for potential customers. When you track this data prior to and after a product release, it highlights areas of opportunity as well as team wins.
Let’s say the example email marketing company’s multiuser log-in release went off without a hitch, and they’re seeing an increase in current customers inquiring about the feature, but new prospects don’t seem to know it exists.
Digging into website traffic for their product landing pages and tracking engagement in their email campaigns shows the example company that there are lower conversion rates in prospects than current customers. That could mean a few different things: either the prospect personas aren’t as accurate as the company thought, or the content surrounding release didn’t showcase the real value of the company’s product. Either way, marketing data helped the email marketing company see where they went wrong.
With that data on hand, they can make the requisite adjustments to their release project plan in the future. The next time the company releases a feature for enterprise companies, it will be easier to refine the target audience and create content that speaks to that audience’s needs.
Seeing an increase in website traffic or an uptick in customer inquiries is evidence of the overall success of your release-management plan. When you combine this with the increased visibility into customer behavior, it’s easy to boost engagement with the product-development process within your team.
Marketing Data Is the Key to Building Better Products
When you have a better understanding of your market and your customers, it’s easy to see what they find valuable. Marketing data is your key to gaining this understanding and gives your team the insight they need to create products that customers will love.
Taplytics helps you gather, analyze, and act on your marketing data without the need for additional third-party tools. When you’re spending time and resources on every project, the more data you have on hand, the easier it is to make good decisions for your team.