Data-driven marketing: harnessing the power of analytic
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Modern marketing is both an art and a science, with its practitioners creatively leveraging information about consumers to sell them a product. Like any other scientific field, marketing relies heavily on research as businesses collect data about consumer behavior to craft the most effective marketing techniques.
Between the Internet and AI in marketing and research tools, modern businesses have access to a massive amount of data. But gathering that information is just the first part of the equation. When businesses effectively analyze data about their target audience, they can leverage their marketing insights to build their brand, drive revenue, and deepen connections with their audience.
What is data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing refers to promotional strategies that are heavily based on research and user information. While early marketing strategies may have been driven by assumptions, modern marketers use every resource at their disposal to improve business communications.
Companies no longer have to rely on external market studies that quickly become outdated. By using their own first-party cookies, they can directly gather data about real users browsing their sites.
Consumer information doesn’t just help shape the future of digital marketing strategies. It helps measure their success. Data-driven metrics like bounce rate and customer acquisition cost give businesses the information they need to assess the impact of their marketing content. By setting up a system to regularly sort, collect, and assess marketing data, brands can optimize their marketing strategies to maximize the return on their investment.
The benefits of data-driven marketing
A thoughtful data-driven approach can have far-reaching effects, impacting everything from customer relationships to consumer finances. Understanding the main benefits of implementing a data-driven strategy empowers business owners and marketers to apply data in a way that targets their goals.
Attracting customers with personalization
Consumers are used to seeing advertisements on a regular basis and have learned to tune out messaging that doesn’t directly speak to their interests. In fact, 76% of consumers indicated that they get frustrated when they receive advertisements and product suggestions that don’t relate to their interests.1
Providing relevant taglines and advertisements to users can be the difference between getting a click and losing a potential customer. Customers may be more likely to click on a suggested product, share a blog, or comment on a post if they’re already interested.
By gathering data about consumers and using it to personalize the content they see, businesses can produce a marketing campaign that’s truly worthy of audience engagement. When companies make small adjustments to the way they market to different personas, they provide more compelling, relevant advertisements while still maintaining a consistent brand presence.
Strengthening customer connections
Personalized advertisements are just the beginning of how companies can leverage consumer information. Businesses can use data to cultivate deep connections with their consumers and make customers feel special.
Once a business has a base level of information about its customers, it can implement personalizations such as:
- Offering targeted promotions based on browsing habits and purchase history
- Following up about brand and customer interactions
- Addressing the customer by name
- Sending celebratory emails for birthdays and other milestones
By catering communications to each customer, companies can build an approachable, friendly brand that promotes customer loyalty. When businesses focus on making the consumer feel good through personalized customerinteractions, they develop authentic relationships that translate to engagement and sales.
Focusing on successful ventures
Companies can analyze their marketing data to identify which strategies have the most significant impact. Analytics tools help digital marketing agencies or marketers quantify the return on investment for different aspects of their marketing campaign budget, giving them the opportunity to focus on their most successful ventures. Businesses seeking to maximize revenue and improve brand awareness can choose tailored metrics to track how each aspect of their marketing budget affects these factors. Based on their analysis, they can optimize their budget and eliminate expenses that aren’t contributing to their bottom line.
Improving the customer experience
The more a business knows about its customers, the better it can serve their needs in all stages of the buying process and beyond. Customer experience has a direct correlation to revenue, and consumers who have a poor customer experience are much more likely to switch brands.2 Crafting a customer experience that eliminates pain points is one of the key steps in building a loyal customer base.
By analyzing consumer behavior, marketers can uncover what elements of the user experience make them leave the sales funnel, and what entices them to stay. Companies can use their marketing analytics to learn what matters most to users when they’re making a purchase or using a product.
The results of a marketing analysis can help business owners create a more intuitive website design, adjust their content strategy, or change how they provide product support.
Honing the target audience
Businesses typically have at least a general idea of their target audience, but data analytics can reveal new information about what types of consumers are interested in their products. Consumer data can uncover shopper personas that the business may not have been aware of, giving them the opportunity to tap into a new market.
While a company may have originally intended to focus on a specific audience, the data might show that a different group is resonating with their content or using their products. The marketing team can then adjust its messaging or design its user experience with that persona in mind, incorporating even more customization into its content and capturing more of the consumers that are likely to buy their products.
Identifying untapped channels
Modern consumers have a wide variety of communication and e-commerce channels at their disposal, from social media to shopping apps. To build an effective sales funnel, businesses must understand buyer behavior across every marketing channel they regularly use. Even if they’re thriving on a certain platform, they may be missing an entire segment of their audience by neglecting other communication platforms.
A thorough marketing analytics strategy explores both how consumers behave and where they spend their time online. Brands can use consumer data to discover what platforms and devices they use most frequently, informing the most strategic ways to connect with their target audience. This information makes it easier for brands to implement cross-channel marketing techniques and connect each of their platforms to an overarching customer experience.
Using analytics effectively
It’s not enough for companies to simply gather information and draw conclusions. If any data is incomplete or incorrect, the resulting analysis can be misleading or ineffective. For a data-driven approach to truly pay dividends, businesses must develop a reliable system for both collecting information and interpreting it correctly.
Here are a few key tips on how to get that done.
Establish goals
There’s so much data available online, so it’s critical for businesses to limit the scope of the information they collect. By establishing the purpose of data collection initiatives, businesses can focus on acquiring the most relevant information. Companies in their beginning stages may benefit most from gathering basic demographic and customer behavior data, while those pursuing rapid growth may be more interested in information about engagements and attribution.
Setting marketing objectives and goals before implementing a data-driven marketing strategy also creates benchmarks for assessing its effectiveness. Connecting each goal with relevant KPIs gives marketers quantitative ways to measure success and identify any barriers standing in the way of success.
Create data guidelines
Data is most useful when it conveys complete, accurate, and up-to-date information. Setting data quality guidelines allows marketers to identify what information is worth keeping.
Businesses can establish limits on the age, scope, and format of their data to ensure they’re drawing accurate conclusions. Establishing data policies also promotes consistency between markets and makes the information in databases easier to interpret.
Respecting consumer privacy
Ethics is at the forefront of any conversation related to consumer data. To uphold integrity as a brand—and adhere to consumer privacy laws—it’s important for companies to obtain permission from consumers before collecting and storing their data.3
Balancing the desire for personalized experiences and the need for personal privacy involves being transparent about what data is being collected, and how it’s being used. Giving users the opportunity to opt out of data collection and being upfront about data use ultimately cultivates trust and respect between companies and their consumers.
As more consumer privacy regulations come out, more companies are shifting from third-party data to their own first-party information. Putting consumer privacy first involves both acquiring consent and using secure methods to store customer information.
Storing and organizing information
Marketing data can come from several different data sources, leading to a variety of separate, fragmented databases known as data silos.
By consolidating all marketing data in one centralized location, businesses can achieve big-picture actionable insights that consider multiple complex factors. Using a single platform for marketing analytics allows marketers to create in-depth reports on niche aspects of their marketing strategy, identify correlations between data points, and ultimately develop a more thorough view of their consumers’ behavior.
Using data to drive growth
By harnessing their data, businesses unlock the opportunity to achieve rapid, focused growth. This evidence-based approach allows them to optimize each element of their digital marketing presence, directly responding to their audience’s motivations and behaviors.
Power Digital provides businesses with a comprehensive approach to collecting data and applying insights. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we understand the breadth of data available to modern companies and help them parse through the noise to uncover the most impactful trends and patterns.
Whether you’re trying to run more effective ads or want to revamp your entire brand identity, Power Digital is ready to crunch the numbers and calculate a data-driven solution for you.
Sources:
- McKinsey & Company. The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying
- Forbes. 50 Stats That Prove The Value Of Customer Experience. https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/09/24/50-stats-that-prove-the-value-of-customer-experience/?sh=15ee76e4ef22
- Reuters. U.S. data privacy laws to enter new era in 2023. https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/us-data-privacy-laws-enter-new-era-2023-2023-01-12/