A Guide To Data-Driven Marketing Strategies

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is a strategy that focuses on the approach of optimizing brand communications based on customer information. This looks at how consumer behavior has changed over the recent years with the help of technology, allowing consumer data to be analyzed and collected, then used to shape the nature of future marketing activities. New technology is making it easier for marketers to track and provide more personalized marketing campaigns towards their customers by analyzing the data in which has been collected. This collected data is called big data and is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign, especially in this current rapidly changing environment. This data allows marketers to understand current and new consumers’ ever-changing needs and hidden market opportunities.

Benefits of Data-driven marketing

Companies can use data-driven strategies to evaluate and organize their data to serve their customers and consumers better. An organization may contextualize and personalize its marketing to customers by leveraging data to drive its activities, resulting in a more customer-centric approach. It allows your business to understand your customers better and develop more targeted offerings appealing directly to their needs. As well as overall optimizing your business operations, a data-driven marketing strategy allows marketers to use their time better, allowing less time to be spent on basic analysis and more time on strategy development and look at the bigger picture.

How to Create Data-driven Marketing 

So, let’s talk specifics. When considering a data-driven marketing strategy, it is important to understand the key elements involved. Therefore, marketers looking to extend into data-based marketing must understand every element and follow these steps to ensure the true value of a data-driven marketing strategy is obtained.

1: Set a well-defined goal 

At number 1 is the need for setting a clear and achievable goal. In every marketing campaign, well-defined goals need to be set from the beginning of the campaign. For example, whether your business wants to gain exposure or develop higher customer satisfaction rates, any of these set goals need to be measurable, allowing firms to track their progress towards the intended goal and make necessary changes if needed. There is also a need for goals to be developed alongside deadlines, thereby ensuring that marketing campaigns remain on time and constantly progress.

2: Understand your target audience 

Secondly, to achieve success, you must understand your target market. Marketing strategies that emphasize a personalized customer experience perform significantly better in the long run. One way to get better control of your marketing is to continually improve the data quality- applying data checks to confirm the accuracy and reliability of your collected information. Given that data is constantly changing with consumer trends, a constant need for accurate, current, and updated information underpins all success within a data-driven marketing strategy.

Another way to ensure you are meeting the consumer needs of your target audience is to use predictive analytics. By doing so, marketers can identify consumer behavior patterns in company data, make key changes to relevant strategies, and help explain recent trends before they occur. This data can then identify which customers are considered high quality (business will put in time and effort with these) and which are considered low-quality customers which are not worth the business putting time and resources into targeting. Recent research by Invesp showed that 88% of marketers use data obtained by third parties to understand their consumers better. In addition, businesses that use data-driven personalization recorded between five and eight greater ROIs within marketing budgets.

3: Select your best marketing channels 

Next on the list is coordinating your marketing channels. The omnichannel approach works to combine, align, and coordinate all marketing across the different channels available. When selecting your best marketing channels, marketers must consider how the target audience will use each channel and choose the most relevant. To implement automated omnichannel marketing, there are three crucial steps marketers must follow. First, marketing channels must be chosen, such as social media or paid influencers, while considering how the target audience will engage with each source. Next, marketers must establish modeling and attribution to ensure the data is categorized and presented effectively. Lastly, marketers must complete regular data checks to confirm the accuracy, relevancy, and legitimacy of information, especially when data is constantly updating.

4: Serve appropriate content 

Another must-do when creating data-driven marketing is sharing appropriate content that aligns with the campaign’s focus and company goals. To do this, all previous steps must be met, specifically understanding your audience, as if not achieved, the content will be irrelevant. Marketing the right content involves two key elements. Firstly, it is important that marketers continually update the central marketing messages and adjust campaigns according to firm goals. Secondly, all marketing campaigns must be analysis-based marketing decisions. This means that rather than going with what competitors are doing, marketers must ignore the ‘noise’ and instead focus on what their data is saying. Effectively using and understanding what your specific data is saying helps determine what material works and doesn’t for your target audience at each stage of the purchasing process.

5: Track your campaigns

With the constant evolution of marketing, it’s crucial to continuously evaluate campaigns and advertising strategies from a data perspective to understand market opportunities. To track your campaign’s success or lack of success, marketers should use big data to analyze the ROI of their marketing techniques and use this data to guide future efforts. Making sure marketers and analysts keep track of marketing-related data is important as the results can be used to update key stakeholders on your progress and confirm what is and isn’t effective. Furthermore, by tracking the success of different data-driven strategies, marketers can use what they learn from data patterns to execute future campaigns. Tracking your marketing efforts is crucial to seeing your campaigns remain on track and progress is continually being moved.

Looking into the future, marketing in the next years will shift towards becoming increasingly data-driven. Interestingly, 71% of marketers will implement big data analytics into their marketing strategies in the coming three years. Thus, companies who can use insights obtained from the data they collect about their consumers will easily have an advantage over their competitors. Nowadays, data-driven marketing is a central technique in developing brand loyalty, giving companies a competitive advantage. These five steps to developing a data-driven marketing strategy allow today’s marketers to grow at rates like never before and understand greater depths of consumer needs.

If your business wants to develop a data-driven strategy bound for success, speak to our marketing consultants today.