How to Optimally Use Data in Marketing?

For many years, the role of data in marketing strategies was not being maximised as much as it should have. So many organisations referred to data with the sole aim of measuring its impact. However, today the scenario has changed completely. The wide use of the internet has managed to change the role of data for marketing.

At the present time, a combination of online marketing strategies, data mining, and data analytics is enough to measure the marketing progress. The data that gets flooded in from all channels including websites, display ads, search results, social media posts, and so on helps immensely in taking important decisions.

From the abundance of data that data mining extracts, there is a new process that has come into action and that process is called data-driven marketing. So, what is data-driven marketing and how can data-driven marketing be optimally used for making the marketing process simple.

What is Data-Driven Marketing?

Just as the name suggests, data-driven marketing is a process that uses customer data to make suitable and more informed marketing decisions. There are many marketing automation and intelligence tools that are capable of collecting data from various sources and offering insights into customer behaviour and preferences.

Marketers use data for improving their online marketing strategies. The data helps in gaining a deeper understanding of the customers for performing personalised and targeted outreach. It also helps in building meaningful customer engagement and maximising the marketing efforts on the return of investment. 

Data-Driven Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing has long been used by marketers but it was limited in many ways. The marketers had limited information about the audiences which also meant that the important decisions were based on assumptions. Many times, the marketers also resorted to the trial and error methods as a lead generation technique.

In the past, no one could be confident about the success of a marketing campaign. Even the data sources and by that we mean the market studies were unreliable. There was a limited measurement of their effectiveness and the traditional campaigns produced no measurable insights about the markets that were targeted and their audiences. Companies were required to strategize better consistently.

With the entry of data-driven marketing in the picture, all the guesswork was replaced with some hard-hitting facts. With techniques such as data analytics and data mining, marketers can extract data and drill it down to the needs and preferences of demographics, digital behaviour, buying patterns, interests, etc.

Marketers can pretty much reach their audience at the right time and place. This can be done with personalised messages and offers that are capable of increasing conversions. Hence, data-driven marketing is one of the best methods to get more leads.

That said, data-driven marketing is not the end of traditional marketing. It is definitely the best method for promoting middle and bottom-funnel campaigns, but traditional marketing techniques are perfect for creating awareness. While entering new markets and segmenting audiences, organisations should maximise their reach.

Traditional marketing will always be a great method for building brand recognition and attracting new customers at a scale. However, companies need data-driven online marketing strategies for nurturing their audience and to ensure that they stick around for a long time.

Why Use Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing comes with many benefits altogether. This is the reason why some of the leading marketers are 72% likely to invest in the quality of data that they capture. 

1. Understanding Target Audience

The data-driven marketing techniques such as data mining and data analytics are an excellent way to look into the indicators such as page or blog visits, ad clicks, video views, products added to the cart, and much more.

When marketers use these techniques strategically, it becomes easy to engage them in the right channels that lead to the right conversations as well.

2. Audience Segmentation

Data is an excellent way to create segments based on interest, demography, purchase history, geography, etc. It can be used for running campaigns that are specific to each segment for boosting conversion.

With data mining, marketers can create campaigns that they know will appeal to audiences no matter what. The segmentation makes the marketers understand just what will appeal to the audience.

3. Personalised Messaging

Marketers can also use data to personalise their messaging and offer suitable products, content and also the next best action recommendations for helping decision making.

For instance, let’s say a visitor on an e-commerce website sees a product many times. Now the number of times a visitor sees this product can be gauged for understanding the intent with which a customer is coming online and wishes to purchase the product. 

The personalised messaging is capable of improving sales conversion by 10-15%. Over 90% of marketers say that personalization leads to improved business profitability.

4. Omni Channel Experience

It becomes easy to track the cross channel data with the use of data-driven marketing techniques. The marketers can trace the customer journey and also offer an omnichannel experience that changes from digital to physical and vice versa

The organisations that offer a consistent experience to their customers across all channels see a 5-15% revenue increase which is substantial in all ways.

5. Targeted Ad Buying

Data analytics is an excellent method to combine customer data with algorithms that can find a suitable method for displaying digital ads.

These ads can be placed strategically on the right platforms and they can be promoted thereon for fetching suitable results.

6. Marketing ROI

The use of customer data for driving marketing campaigns helps in optimising the performance on different channels and improves attribution accuracy as well.

Marketers can easily determine which channels return the maximum revenue at nominal expenditure while investing to reduce costs. In addition, it also helps in making much better predictions while planning the budget and resources optimally.

Data-Driven Marketing Trends

It is a known fact that data is the new currency in the present times and even the most valuable one. After the world got hit by the pandemic in 2020, data has become supreme. There was a massive move to digital with more and more people coming indoors as the pandemic related restrictions increased.

Consumers and businesses adopted digital means of doing their work and the data became supreme. Some of the common trends that continue to transform data-driven marketing are mentioned below.

1. Automation and Personalization

The USP of AI is in converting massive amounts of raw data into comprehensible information within a few seconds. This is clearly something that humans cannot do. 

Moreover, the impact of AI across industries and functions is considered in every sense. It continues to help marketers make personalised and real-time engagement at scale. The application of advanced data mining algorithms can help marketers to learn systems from the available data and improve them over time.

Automation and personalization are excellent ways to harness and act on the right data and that too at the right time without any kind of manual intervention. It leads to advanced results in a streamlined way.

2. Predictive Analysis

Data-driven marketing techniques lead to predictive analysis that keeps marketers a lot more agile. The data analysis methods allow marketers to build agile data models that help in keeping pace with quickly changing customer behaviours.

AI-powered predictive analysis helps marketers to stay on top of existing customer behaviour while planning for upcoming marketing strategies.

3. Privacy and Security Concerns

With an increase in data breaches all over the world, most customers are left anxious about their data. They do not know how, when, and where their data is going to be compromised. 

There are common data privacy regulations that require marketers to become more transparent about how they use customer data. Many tech giants across the world have taken steps for addressing customer security concerns with the direction to remove third party cookies from websites.

Hence, marketers must find a way to depend on their own data as opposed to third-party sources because privacy and security regulations are becoming tightened. This is something that requires marketers to enhance their tech stack and adopt future-ready data-driven marketing methods.

4. Breakdown of Data Silos

Most customer data that resides with each team is supposed to be made accessible to all unless the data is sensitive or confidential. When there is improved data sharing, there is an increase in the visibility of customer journeys.

The breakdown of data silos helps in building comprehensive and connected data-driven strategies that can ultimately benefit all stakeholders.

Using Data-Driven Marketing Strategies Optimally

The use of data for driving marketing outreach allows most marketers to put customers at the centre of everything that they do and engage in. The complete idea of data-driven marketing is usually for optimising benefits for marketers and making sure that customers do not have to face irrelevant and annoying messages that affect their journey.

Some of the data-driven marketing strategies that are useful for improving and personalising customer engagement include:

1. Consolidation of Data

A very good lead generation technique is bringing all the data and your organisation in just one place. This is something that allows you to create a consistent customer journey all across channels and touchpoints.

Moreover, it also provides consistent and contextual customer experiences. Once the data consolidation starts happening, it becomes easy to unite the brand messaging across functions and not just the marketing campaigns.

2. Improved Audience Segmentation

Data analytics is an excellent method to know your target audience in a better way. Once you know your audience segments better, it becomes easier to target them optimally.

Since the goal is to make marketing a lot more relevant, it is best to start by creating well-defined audience segments that can address the audience’s needs in ways that suit their specific needs and journeys.

Data including demographic details, digital behaviour shown by a customer, preferred platforms on which customers spend their time, etc. are suitable for segmenting the audiences. It is also possible to refine the segments on the basis of the level of engagement.

3. Content Optimization

The data-driven marketing techniques also help in optimising the content that you post on most platforms. You can perfect your content by analysing the data for revealing finder nuances about the audience and their personalities.

Once you understand the preferences of the audience, it will become very simple for you to create and refine your content across all platforms while making it very useful and engaging. This is a useful lead generation technique that can be used by brands for better promotion.

4. Understanding Buyer Personas

The data-driven marketing techniques for understanding the buyer’s persona in a much better way. You can use the data that you extract for understanding the browsing history, previous purchases, customer engagement, etc. for creating evolved buyer personas.

The data helps in reconnecting with and reminding your audience about your brand at the right time and on the right platforms so that prompt action can be taken. You can also display targeted ads on social media and even send abandoned cart emails so that they can be nudged towards making the purchase.

5. Unification of Customer Experience

Customer journeys have become very comprehensive in nature while making it important for companies to develop the capabilities required for recognising and engaging customers regardless of the channel used.

Using an omni-channel strategy based on unified data from various channels and teams can help in streamlining customer journeys while bringing down their churn rates.

6. Best Promotion Time

The data-driven marketing is also an excellent method to find the best time for promotions. The historical data can help in getting clarity on which day, month, and year is suitable for getting maximum engagement.

Once you are able to optimise the time and duration of the promotional campaigns, it is likely that the audience will notice you keenly. This in turn will lead to brand promotion and wide recognition in the long run.

Conclusion

One of the best methods to ensure an effective marketing plan is by making the customers feel that they are being engaged in a personal and a one to one conversation. The customers should not feel that they are being marketed to. Using data-driven marketing does exactly this by creating a more meaningful and customised experience.

It leads to well-timed and relevant personalization while guiding the customers to make purchases and repelling them ultimately. The consistent and groundbreaking developments in big data and AI are sure to make data-driven marketing even stronger.

The data-driven marketing is the future and brands should adopt digital marketing services that are implemented in sync with it before it is too late. If you are also looking for data-driven marketing services then get in touch to know more.