Data is everywhere. Similarly to water, the online marketing world has an ocean of data but we are capable of distilling only a minuscule amount of information to drive our daily marketing activities.
Internet Marketing is always deemed as something only business oriented people should handle, but with the rising importance of data science and data analytics, web marketers are challenged to adopt data to drive their marketing strategies.
Data is the reason why digital marketing has become more cost friendly than traditional marketing. Data has given us the ability to analyze each step of your marketing progress and base your strategy on experience rather than gut intuition.
What is Data-Driven Marketing?
Data-driven marketing refers to strategies built on data obtained from customer engagement and interaction. The data is analyzed to understand customer behavior and predict future trends. The marketing strategy includes understanding the data you have, building a path to gain more insights and how to organize, analyze and apply the data to optimize your marketing campaigns.
Application of Data in Marketing
Both consumers and marketers can benefit when businesses integrate data into their Digital marketing strategies. A lot of current marketers understand the importance of this data analysis and are continuously building strategies to extract the maximum benefit from the data available.
But if you are still unsure about the benefits of data in Internet marketing, let me bring some points into the limelight
Approach Customer at a More Personal Level
The data-driven approach allows a company to understand who their users are and what are they expecting. This gives marketers the ability to create content which touches their customer on a more personalized level. These way users are not bombarded with a product they have no interest in and marketers get highly qualified leads with more potential of conversion.
Adopt a Clear Cut Approach
With data tools in hand marketers can devise a clear cut strategy to target their audience. They understand how to segment their audience in different categories and run campaigns to specifically target a product which suits best for their audience.
Run Multi-Channel Campaigns
Today’s consumer access the same business with multiple devices and platforms. Data analytics help us understand this behavior and help you optimize the strategies on all the necessary platforms and drive higher customer engagements. The approach needs to be consistent and must be tailored to suit the platform’s content format. Data-driven marketing helps you analyze which content format is suitable for a particular platform.
Example – Data analysis can help you understand whether your customer is more engaged in video ads or text ads. If they are interested in watching more video ads on Facebook, you can target the audience with video ads on both Facebook and YouTube and cut down the cost of ineffective text ads.
Refine Your Customer Experience
According to Google, a good user experience is one of the top ranking factors for websites. Many brands today leverage surveys and other tactics to identify what their users want and use this information to create a memorable customer experience. Right from creating a sales pitch to designing the website layout data-driven marketing helps you curate a customer-centric approach.
Better Product Development
Data-driven strategies can substantially diminish the chances of product failure. Since you can pretty much already predict what your customer wants, it helps businesses to develop products which their audience is interested in rather than analyzing it after the failure.
How To Integrate Data-driven Marketing Strategies with Business Goals
Whether you are just starting to adopt new strategies or trying to improve your efficiency these factors are the stepping stones of building great data-driven strategies.
Build a Full Proof Plan
Changes can be difficult and data analysis is no exception. You need to design a full proof plan to adopt the data-driven approach involving people from various departments of your company. A company must dedicate optimum time and resources to allow a smooth transition. There will definitely be some hurdles but having a full proof plan will help you keep your progress and goal on track.
Use Automation Wherever Possible
Daily customer activity generates a sheer volume of customer data and it is impossible even for the most efficient teams to collect all the necessary information. Hence it is advisable to integrate automation tools wherever possible. Successful data analysis is important for marketers to build strategies but it is not possible if most of their time is spent in collecting data rather than analyzing it.
Automation collects data on your behalf and you can concentrate your efforts on more important activities like actually analyzing the data building strategies around it.
Build the Best Team Possible
Since adopting data-driven marketing is still new for many businesses you need to have the best team possible;a team which is ready to undergo this huge transformation. It doesn’t mean that you pair up a technical person with Digital marketing agency and lead the project. Your team must go beyond its expertise to adopt new techniques and should possess the ability to think deeply on more enterprise level.
Cross-Department Approach
Creating a cross-department strategy will not only aid a smooth transition but also boost the morale of your team members by valuing their opinion. Different departments have different approaches to collect and apply data. This can work against your goal if their approaches start contradicting each other. To avoid this situation you must keep top to bottom level departments in the loop and help them chase a single unified goal.
Spy on Your Competitors
Keeping an eye on your competitors is vital for today’s businesses and it has got much easier with web marketing. You need to know what your competitors are doing and if they are doing it successfully try to replicate their ideas using your own approach or try learning by avoiding their mistakes. Marketers must stay up to date with the latest analytical trends to drive their business strategy forward.
Test, Test and Test
The biggest boon of data-driven marketing is its ability to analyze live campaigns and make any changes if necessary. There is no one-size-fits-all approach and hence you need to continuously test your theories and try to optimize the results obtained. Not only testing helps you optimize your campaigns but also saves your online marketing budget and boosts ROI.
Summary
There is still a lot to discover about customer behavior and the way they approach business. But implementing data-driven marketing techniques is a great way to begin your strategy building. Predictive marketing is getting stronger each day and hence it is important to integrate data before its too late.
