Introduction
With customers online more than ever, brands need to take advantage of data. By doing so, companies will understand customer journeys more deeply and easily spot market patterns, helping create a critical market advantage in an ever-competitive field.
But how do you use data effectively?
That’s where you need the right data-driven marketing strategy. But with constantly changing regulations, you need a strategy that’s highly adaptive, flexible and customer-centric, allowing you to collect data, ethically and efficiently.
In our latest article, we’ll introduce data-driven marketing, some of its advantages, and three simple steps to power your decision-making.
What is data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing is where companies collect data from customers to predict trends, gain market insights and make better, more accurate and more timely, marketing decisions.
For the best results, data is drawn from all consumer touchpoints to give a complete view of customers and their respective journeys. With this information, you’ll be able to deepen your customer understanding, know the most effective media channels, and what adverts work best.
An effective data-driven marketing strategy will:
- Improve your marketing performance;
- Save you time and resources;
- Help you better connect with customers;
- Grow your audience.
Here’s why your brand should introduce a data-driven marketing strategy
Improve your customer relationships
Customers don’t want generic messages from brands. They want something personal – an offer that speaks to them. And a data-driven strategy helps you deliver personalized customer messages.
By collecting and analyzing data, from purchase history to market behavior, you’ll be able to communicate more effectively with your customers. This will lead to better engagement and ultimately, drive your sales.
Market more effectively on the right channels
Each customer target group behaves differently and engages with certain channels more than others. But by using data, you’ll be able to discover your customers’ most used channels to ensure your targeted ads are effective. This will help you increase click-through rates and optimize your ad spend.
How to use data to drive your marketing decisions
Here are three steps to get your data-driven marketing strategy off the ground:
1. Start with an objective
When setting up a data-driven marketing strategy, most brands waste time and resources collecting unnecessary data. Instead, ask yourself the following questions to help maximize your strategy’s impact:
- Do you want to know the media channels your customers use?
- Do you want to understand customer perceptions of your brand?
- Do you want to trace the source of growth for your business?
Starting with a purpose sets the direction for later steps. This helps you save time and stay organized.
2. Collect and analyze
When collecting data, you need to use advanced technology that is able to collect from a wide range of touchpoints. This will give you a more complete view of your customers and the market. From here, you can then analyze the data and look for patterns.
Here are some top tips for analyzing data:
- Keep in mind your objective: Always go back to your original goal when working with any data set -this should keep you on track and produce faster insights.
- Be on the lookout for trends: A good practice when conducting data analysis is to compare findings in different periods. By doing so, you might notice several interesting patterns that can inform strategic marketing decisions.
- See the big picture: Most marketers only focus on surface-level data. But this approach doesn’t allow you to solve the root causes of your marketing problems. Instead, dig deeper by asking why, as this will help you understand the whole picture.
3. Report findings
Now that you’ve finished analyzing data, you need to present all of your findings to management levels. We suggest using charts that visualize the numbers while organizing your report in a visually engaging way. This will help make your presentation more impactful and memorable.
Occasionally, other departments will join your report meetings. So, avoid industry-specific words and turn your presentation into a story that’s accessible to everyone.
Additional strategies to power your marketing
Here are a couple of ways to strengthen your data-driven marketing strategy.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are cutting-edge technologies that collect data from multiple sources to build comprehensive customer profiles. By pulling data across numerous touchpoints, you’ll be able to create more personal and effective marketing campaigns.
Also, CPDs make your workflow more efficient by streamlining data tasks. As a result, you’ll reduce the margin for errors and free time for other critical business projects.
Outsource your marketing
Building a data-driven marketing strategy takes a lot of time and effort. Your in-house teams might not have the capability, and it could be costly to hire more employees. That’s why you should consider outsourcing your data marketing.
With outsourced marketing experts, you’ll unlock the power of data and receive meaningful insights into your local and global operations, offering key marketing strategies to improve your production efficiency -all while saving costs compared to in-house.
Our final thoughts
In the digital age, it’s crucial your business takes advantage of data. Through the right data strategies, you’ll be able to build personalized and effective marketing campaigns, helping you spark customer engagement and drive higher ad conversions. With a strong data strategy, you’ll also reduce ineffective spending decisions, ultimately saving costs and increasing your ROI.
Want to grow your company and save costs? It’s time to invest in data-driven marketing.
