In a new piece, New York magazine lays out a series of strategies to make your companies data more valuable to advertisers and your business more efficient and profitable.
The article, titled “Logistics Engineer: How to Make Your Company More Advertiser-Friendly” lays out four common data-mining tactics for boosting your ad sales, from boosting search engine optimization to tracking sales and marketing spending.
First up is the concept of the “marketing machine,” which refers to your marketing department’s work with advertisers to find the most relevant keywords for your customers to click on.
The more you can leverage the information from those search results, the more valuable it will be to you as an advertiser.
Second, you want to increase your ability to track sales and spend in the hopes of boosting revenue.
Lastly, you can use data to better understand how to improve your business, which can help you target your best customers.
“It’s like if you were to find a car in a museum, it would be the most valuable thing on the planet,” writes New York, which is where the idea of “market machine” comes from.
“You’d have the best museum in the world.
But it’s not a car.”
The best marketing departments have a huge amount of data on every single customer they serve.
And because you have so much information at your disposal, the company has a ton of information about you, too.
So you can better understand your customers, your brand, and your competitors.
“Logistical engineers are the best at making sense of the data that’s at their fingertips,” writes writer and business analyst Sam Bridenstine.
“They have the ability to understand a customer’s behavior, where they are, how they’re spending their money, and even how they like the products they’re buying.”
You can even use analytics to figure out how to maximize your revenue from your ad.
You can start by focusing on targeting your best people, or you can look to increase the revenue from targeted ads.
“For example, you could target a customer based on where they shop, their age, their income, where their bank account is, and so on,” says New York.
“That could help you earn a lot of extra revenue.”
A third method to increase revenue is to increase sales and improve your efficiency.
“This is one of the biggest myths that I hear from people who are struggling to get out of a difficult situation,” Bridenstein explains.
“One of the easiest ways to increase income is to spend less money on the things you don’t use.”
That could include buying less expensive items.
But there are other ways to improve efficiency, too, such as reducing the amount of email marketing you send.
You could also hire a sales rep to help you understand your ads better.
“A lot of marketers have to do the work of understanding a person’s needs and wants, and then understanding what their goals are and then delivering what they need,” says Bridenste.
“And this is a big part of why the data is so valuable.”
It’s also important to get your salespeople familiar with the marketing tools your company already has, so they can help guide you to the best strategies to drive more revenue.
And if you’re a freelancer, the data you already have can be valuable.
“Freelancers are the most creative, creative people in the universe,” Bridanstein says.
“We’re really good at getting a customer to open a product, because that’s what our clients want, and we’re not afraid to say, ‘Here’s how you can improve this.'”
There’s more to improving your business than just data, though.
“Data has always been a very big part in the way that people get their information,” says Branding Agency CEO Brian O’Neill.
“There’s nothing new about this.
But I think people are now looking at how to use analytics in a way that they weren’t before.”
Bridensten says there’s one big trend that’s changing how businesses can better manage their data, too: more consumers.
“The average consumer is not going to look at a marketing budget and say, I’m going to spend $100 on this,” says O’Neil.
“But with this new wave of consumer awareness, I think it’s going to change how people think about their data.”
“What’s going on in the data-driven world of the internet is that the information that you’re generating now is going to be the information people are going to use, whether that’s for their shopping or their financial decisions,” he adds.
“With the way we live our lives, that means that we have to be aware of how our data is being used.”
In this digital world, data has become a big deal.
But what are the ways you can harness it for maximum growth?
We spoke with O’Connell about his insights into how you should optimize your data to maximize profits
