A data-driven marketing strategy is a modern marketing strategy where businesses use customer information to create targeted and optimal marketing messages. This marketing approach takes advantage of big data, which has brought many transformational and revolutionary changes to digital marketing.
The surge in quality and quantity of data coupled with advancing technologies has made it possible for businesses to make accurate marketing decisions. Data-driven decisions accurately answer customer-related questions, such as who, where, when, and what. Read on for more about data-driven marketing, its benefits, and how you can adapt it to your business.
Benefits
Businesses can benefit from data-driven marketing in the following ways;
- Personalized marketing strategies – an effective marketing strategy should convey the right marketing message to the right audience at the right time. Data-based marketing campaigns provide deep insights on customer profiles, enabling brands to develop customized campaigns that increase lead conversion rates. Personalized marketing enables businesses to engage with their audience at individual levels, increasing customer loyalty and ROI.
- Accurate clarity – big data provides a wealth of information to businesses, enabling them to use the most accurate information about their prospects and customers. Using a data-driven approach enables brands to separate and group their target audience.
- Multi-channel experience – data collected from multiple sources enable marketers to go beyond general communication and deliver an omnichannel marketing experience. Distributing data-backed marketing ads enables businesses to send consistent and aligned messages.
- Refines customer experience – businesses can also use data-driven campaigns to boost their customer experience. This includes using customer satisfaction questionnaires and surveys to pinpoint specific areas that require improvement.
- Better product development – data-driven decisions significantly reduce product failure rates. Big data enables companies to understand their target audience better, leading to the development of better products.
Challenges
Like any other business strategy, big data has its fair share of challenges. They include;
- Difficulty in finding the right team – handling big data may be challenging for most businesses. Finding a team with the right skills to handle predictive analysis and other facets of big data is difficult.
- Departmental silos – the success of any data-driven strategy heavily relies on the use of high-quality data, which is not easy to obtain. In most cases, different departments acquire data that meet their goals but are contradictory.
- Commitment – Adopting a data-driven marketing strategy without committing to it completely is not beneficial. Even with a proper data collection strategy, it won’t mean much without the proper tech tools required for data analysis.
- Asking the right questions – while collecting data might be easy, converting data into actionable insights is quite daunting. You also need to ask the right questions to collect the right data. Asking the wrong questions will lead to irrelevant answers.
How to Create Your Marketing Campaign
Consider the following steps if you want to create a data-driven marketing strategy;
- Define your objectives – you should have clearly set goals for your data before you start the collection. This enables you to identify the type of information you should collect and where to obtain it.
- Gather data – using your objectives, start collecting information that is beneficial to your strategy. Make sure that you take advantage of various data collection tools.
- Organize data – this step primarily involves organizing all the collected data while maintaining its quality.
- Data analysis for insights – collected data only becomes beneficial once it has been analyzed. Depending on your set objectives, you might analyze data in-house or outsource to an intelligent data platform, who can help in extracting and gaining insights from the collected data.
- Select your marketing channels – with your analyzed data; you can select the right marketing channels to run your campaigns. Your options include email marketing, social media platforms, websites, and other channels with your audience.
- Launch the campaign – with everything set, launch your data-driven campaign and wait for results.
- Measure performance – you should monitor the performance of your campaign based on specific key performance indicators. Measuring performance makes it easy to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign.
Examples of Campaigns
If you still have doubts about how this marketing strategy can fit into your business model, below are a few examples that can provide some inspiration;
- Retargeting – retargeting prospects is beneficial for digital marketing. Typically, if someone has shown interest in your products or services, you should try looking for them once again.
- Dynamic advertising – data collected from social media enables businesses to create cross-channel ads.
- Optimized paid search – you can analyze your customers based on keywords they use to search for products or those used by your competition.
The Bottom Line
Big data is expected to disrupt the realm of digital marketing. Coupled with other tech tools, including artificial intelligence and automation, businesses should find ways of leveraging data-driven marketing solutions. This is largely due to shifting customer behavior and increased demand for a personalized experience.