Data-Driven Marketing Best Practices and Strategies

18 May Data-Driven Marketing Best Practices and Strategies

There has been a fundamental shift in marketing. The traditional approaches that were mainly “spray and pray” efforts no longer cut it. The consumer today wants a more personalized experience. This is why most businesses are turning to big data. Without metrics, how do you know what’s working and what’s not?
Data-driven marketing is more beneficial than flying blind with your marketing campaigns. Big data has helped countless businesses to deliver a much higher return on investment (ROI) because they can analyze the success of their marketing campaigns and make adjustments where necessary. Where do you start? What should you focus on? Read on for insights on how to be data-driven in marketing and the best practices for success.

What Is Data-driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing is a marketing approach that incorporates customer data into all marketing decisions. Brand communications, creative assets, and marketing campaigns are optimized based on customer information.
With this approach, customer data is front and center. It is used to predict customer desires, needs, and future behaviors. This way, all marketing efforts are relevant to the consumer, which translates to a high ROI.

What Are the Benefits of Data-driven Marketing?

Ensures Your Business Is Customer-focused

The real drivers of your business growth are your customers, so your focus should be on them. This enables you to develop marketing campaigns and brand messages that resonate with your target audience, which helps to build meaningful connections with your customers.

Helps You Better Understand Your Customers

Metrics used in data-driven marketing strategies help you understand your target audience. What works for them? What do they want? When do they want it? If you can answer these questions, then you can predict customer behavior and craft marketing campaigns that will reach the customers with the right message at the right time.

Helps To Uncover Best Channels for Promotion

When creating a marketing campaign, you want to reach your target audience where they are. Understanding the nuances of what channels work best for what audiences is essential to spend optimization efforts. Attribution data can help you determine high-value channels by seeing how often a particular ad or asset was engaged and how often it led to conversion.

Gives Insights To Help Craft Messaging That Resonates and Motivates

Using attribution data, your team can determine the types of messaging that grab the attention of your target audience. This type of data helps you generate content that resonates and motivates, and this message is then sent to the right consumers where they are, creating a personalized experience.

What Challenges Are Associated With Data-driven Marketing?

Executing and managing data-driven marketing strategies is no walk in the park. Many moving parts need to work seamlessly for the success of this approach. Some of the common challenges faced by organizations include:

Gathering Data

It might seem easy, but collecting data can be overwhelming. For one, you want to ask the right questions. Many companies spend millions of dollars collecting irrelevant data that won’t help with ROI.
Your goal should be to gather high-quality data that yields actionable insights. It can be challenging to find, but it enables you to respond to customer needs. The data needs to be consistent and up-to-date.

Data Integration

While data collection is important, data integration is the key to successful marketing strategies. Most organizations accumulate their data in silos without flowing channels between teams. Data-driven marketing strategies are rendered ineffective when there are duplicates and inconsistencies in the data collected.

Building an In-house Data Team

As big data gets bigger by the day, it becomes crucial to work with integrated marketing analytics. This is why building an in-house data team is essential. If data is stored in different places, the right people might not be seeing the most accurate data points. It is crucial to have a dedicated team to ensure effective data management and collaboration.

Best Practices for Data-driven Marketing

The following data-driven marketing best practices will help you reap the most benefits from your marketing strategies:

Know Your Audience

The data you collect is only as helpful as it is accurate. You need to know your audience before you can apply data-driven marketing strategies. Use focus groups, questionnaires, and other methods to know your current customers. Conduct research, build buyer personas, and educate your teams on those profiles. Your data needs to accurately reflect your target audience to be effective.

Data Management

After you’ve collected the data, you need to ensure tools and strategies are in place to manage it. Data-driven marketing is constantly evolving, and so should your data management. With effective methods in place, you can evaluate new marketing opportunities and save time and resources.

Compliance

You need to research laws governing customer data and how to comply. You must ensure you’re operating within the law and respecting your customer’s privacy. Laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are in place to govern how businesses use customer data. These laws protect consumer data and hold organizations accountable. Staying compliant makes your marketing more trustworthy and transparent.

Set up Data Standards

You need to determine the type of data you need. It should relate to the goals of your program. Establish clear data quality policies to ensure you’re using the most current representative data to make important decisions and changes. You can come up with data quality dimensions and send them to every department so each team is recording the same information.

Embrace Marketing Analytics Platforms

Analyzing the astounding amount of data collected can be overwhelming for even the best teams. Marketing analytics platforms automate the measuring, tracking, and analyzing of your campaign performance for improved decision-making. These platforms give you insights to understand audience behavior and adjust strategies to avoid wasting resources.

Data-driven Marketing Strategies

To leverage your customer data for your marketing efforts, consider the following data marketing strategies:

Segment Your Audience

You have a target audience, but that is still broad. There are different customer groups within your target audience, and you need to define the segments. You can use gender, location, age, and many other metrics to help you craft personalized, targeted messages that are more effective.

Content Optimization

All the content you create and publish online must keep your customers in mind. Data-driven marketing is all about using customer data to create content that resonates with your target audience and addresses their pain points, answers their questions, and aligns with their desires.

Retargeting

Retargeting, or remarketing, is an approach that helps you connect with customers who have expressed interest in your brand. This is an effective method, especially for cross-channel marketers. Retargeting is closely tied to building brand awareness through strategies such as social media advertising.

Team Alignment

Big data is versatile. This means that it enables you to bring all your teams together and ensure they are aligned. A customer data platform (CDP) allows you to aggregate customer data so that the entire company has access to the same data for decision-making.

Data-driven Marketing Tools

You can also incorporate analysis and visualization tools to help simplify complex data and clearly communicate analytics results. There are several tools available.

Marketing Automation Software

Technology is revolutionizing marketing, with more and more marketing automation software being developed. It helps you create targeted campaigns that result in a higher ROI. It provides a more detailed picture of customer behavior, which can be used to predict future behavior and leverage it for marketing.

Google Analytics

This is a free tool used to track and report user behavior, like traffic, visitor sessions, customer demographics, behavior flows, conversions, etc. It also connects to your Google Ads account, allowing you to track and report ad performance.

Final Thoughts

Consumer expectations today demand data-driven marketing. You now have an increased number of channels and devices to reach your target audience. Investing in data-driven marketing enables you to create personalized customer experiences, optimize spending, and achieve a greater ROI.
Aktify is the partner you need to take the next step forward. We use robust science and machine learning to delight customers with thoughtful conversations to help build meaningful relationships. We integrate our solutions with customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms working in the background to deliver a 10x ROI to our clients. Get in touch with us today to get started!