Data-driven marketing is a strategy that uses consumer information to purchase media with precision and craft engaging messages. It is one of the most revolutionary shifts to ever occur in digital advertising.
Marketing data quality and volume have increased while automation and creative output tools have rapidly grown. Thanks to the booming mar-tech and ad-tech industries, every part of the marketing experience can now be personalized.
Understanding Data-driven marketing
Data is the new oil, and companies now have more knowledge than ever about their target markets because of access to big data. These businesses use this data to develop cutting-edge, data-driven marketing initiatives.
Making decisions based on data involves taking the answers to queries like “who,” “when,” “where,” and “what message” and turning them into useful information.
A substantially more optimal media and creative strategy is possible through the use of data, frequently in an automated or semi-automatic fashion. It is more individualized to use this people-first marketing approach. Additionally, it has helped advertisers achieve sizable ROIs.
If you’re new to data-driven marketing and want to learn more, or if you want to see some examples that could help you design your next campaign, you’re in luck. As in today’s post, explain everything you need to know about the practice.
How Does Data-Driven Marketing Work?
The goals of data-driven marketing are finding out what works and then doing more of it. Data is gathered from various sources and converted into valuable insights to do this. These serve as the cornerstone of a marketing plan that incorporates all significant media types, including earned, paid, and corporate media.
Four steps can be observed in the process:
Collecting Data
Marketers can gather data from many sources, and a vast amount is available. At every stage of the customer journey, including online and offline, mobile and social, locally and through market research, new interaction points are created between businesses and their customers.
It is always important to know the kind of data you need and the sources of data available to have a good decision-making process.
Users are grouped roughly into target audiences in traditional marketing. The data-driven strategy is more accurate: Personas are used to construct micro-targets that are very precisely defined thanks to detailed data. For instance, online marketers can produce different materials for students with different skill sets and capabilities.
Compiling and Analyzing Data
Turning big data into smart data utilizable to drive activities is the biggest issue in data-driven marketing.
The magic phrase is big data analytics. It is applied to business intelligence to streamline internal corporate procedures. Data is extracted from diverse sources, organized, and assembled consistently to enable meaningful categorization.
Effective analysis demands the appropriate instruments that work together without any issues. Siloed organizational structures must be replaced with ones that function in a connected, integrated manner.
Turning Data Into Strategy
An integrated marketing strategy is developed using the data analysis’s learnings. Along with identifying the most significant opportunities, this should include a clear definition of the objectives and KPIs.
The data should clear where the majority of traffic originates, which pages and channels perform best in conversion, and at what point in the customer journey the majority of users will exit the funnels for sales.
The marketing strategy should be developed holistically to include and integrate various digital and analog channels. These could include offline advertising, email marketing, SEO, partnerships, and events, as well as SEA, display advertising, retargeting, influencer marketing, and SEA.
Measuring Success
Monitoring performance is crucial because improving efficiency is a company’s primary goal. The metrics to be used depend on the purposes of the business.
The Advantages Of Data-Driven Marketing
Data-driven marketing gives companies first-hand tools and insight to optimize their services and get the following benefits:
Target Audience Are More Understandable
Marketing professionals can thoroughly grasp their target market by using information about clients. For instance, customer relationship management (CRM) insights can improve marketers’ capacity to forecast consumer behavior.
Opportunity to Forge Closer Connections With Prospective Consumers
Data-driven marketers frequently use customer relationship management (CRM) software to follow each client’s journey. Marketers may easily view the customer’s purchase history, how they first interacted with the business, and essential demographic data. The likelihood of the business keeping customers grows if it is aware of its precise audience.
According to Tom Benton, the chief executive officer of the Data and Marketing Association, in his Forbes article:
The sheer amount of data from a near-infinite combination of media, devices, platforms and channels allows marketers the opportunity to deliver 1-to-1 customer experiences at a massive scale. If these are leveraged adeptly, a business with a million customers can deliver an experience just as tailored as a business with a dozen customers.
Tom Benton
CEO of the Data and Marketing Association
Find the Most Effective Methods For Promotion
Data could reveal not just a target audience’s preferences. It also suggests the platforms a brand should employ to interact with its audience now and in the future. They could then place the message where their intended audience is.
Personalization
Undoubtedly, customers in today’s market are skeptical of generic marketing messaging. A recent study shows that 74% of consumers are annoyed by brands’ irrelevant material. A brand needs to personalize an offer to their prior encounters so that 79% will consider it.
The Disadvantages of Data-Driven Marketing
Limited In Organic Search
Some businesses discover that content marketing, where they offer customers practical online tools like articles, videos, and podcasts on interested subjects, is the best method for attracting them. A data-driven marketing algorithm can still produce something other than high-quality content marketing since it requires originality and consistent human work.
Not Sufficient to Sell a Great Product
When friends tell others about high-quality goods and services, word-of-mouth advertising can be one of the most effective. So it’s always advisable to complement word-of-mouth advertisements and data automation.
Flaws In Marketing Automation
For some of the consumers who are being targeted, banner ads or promoted social media postings could seem unimportant. These problems are frequently the result of automated marketing campaigns that need more consumer analytics. Human oversight is frequently necessary for data-driven marketing to thrive.
Types Of Data Needed to Run A Program Successfully
Using data to guide essential marketing choices has been a recent tactic. The introduction of CRM in the early 1990s is frequently credited with helping data-driven marketing become more widely accepted. However, data-driven marketing looked different from it when it was first introduced.
Marketers today rely on more than just CRM data to succeed because of technological advances, data diversification, and data’s widespread availability.
To run a fruitful data-driven marketing program, consider the highlighted data below:
CRM Data
The advent of CRM software enables marketers to learn more in-depth information about their prospects and clients.
Marketers frequently use and analyze CRM data to find customer trends and similarities. The customer personas that result from this data guide practically every aspect of a marketing strategy. Customer profiling would be much more challenging without CRM data.
Demographic Data
One of the most often utilized types of marketing data is demographic data. It contains information about particular socioeconomic characteristics of the general population. These data points cover traits like median household income, marital status, gender, age, religion, and level of education, among other things.
It has long been used to make targeted marketing decisions since it offers a thorough insight into the distinguishing qualities of any specific audience. Although demographic data is a more complex and precise dataset, it is a good starting point for marketers who are just learning about their customers.
Firmographic Data
Unlike demographic data, firmographic data is used to characterize enterprises instead of a specific audience or set of people. Company size, location, revenue, industry, and other firmographic data points are included.
This data type benefits B2B companies trying to target a specific kind of customer or organization.
Behavioral Data
Behavioral data, or engagement data, describes the information gathered whenever a client or potential client interacts with a company. Metrics on website activity, ad interactions, content downloads, email clicks, and purchase history are typical examples of behavioral data.
Behavioral data is frequently gathered across several platforms or systems, including CRM, internet analytics platforms, various campaign monitoring interfaces, and many others.
Behavioral data can give you insight into the ways, times, and locations customers connect meaningfully with your brand when paired with other data kinds.
Psychographic Data
Psychographic data offers a more qualitative view of an audience or persona compared to others. It includes values, character, interests, and attitudes. Psychographic information frequently gives context for a person or group of people who appear similar on paper, even if some corporations may view it as unneeded.
Performance Data and Analytics
Analysis of campaign results to optimize and fine-tune various activities is a critical element of data-driven marketing. Because of this, modern marketers need to have access to performance information and campaign-specific analytics.
Intent Data
Intent data explains a person’s or account’s behavior concerning that person or account’s identity and potential readiness to purchase a specific good or service. Intent data is beneficial for sales and marketing teams when prioritizing communication.
Technographic Data
The landscape of marketing data recently welcomed the addition of technographic data. It details the crucial tools and technology a company employs to conduct business. This covers everything, from marketing automation tools to auto-dialers and payroll software.
Technographic data is beneficial if you operate in the B2B marketing industry. Targeting consumers who work for rival companies or already use tools that interact with the product you’re marketing are two of the most obvious uses of technographic data.
Industry Benchmarking Data
Observing how other businesses perform in your industry can be helpful, even if most data-driven marketing techniques focus on internal data. Industry benchmarking data can be beneficial in this situation. Businesses can evaluate their performance concerning other companies in the same sector using this data.
Benchmarking data can be a helpful tool to track development, particularly for young businesses, even if it’s crucial to put only a little faith in industry statistics.
Conclusion
Data-driven marketing strategies are essential for firms’ and enterprises’ performance across all industries in today’s intense competition. Targeting an appropriate audience enables marketing professionals to take advantage of data analytics.
Make the most of data-driven solutions to optimize your marketing spending, boost your ROI and revenues, and — most importantly — learn which marketing strategies are most effective to grow your business.
