Creating Data-Driven Marketing Strategies: Areas To Focus On

Data-driven marketing harnesses first-party and third-party data to understand customer motivations, behaviours, and preferences. Such credible insights allow businesses to personalise assets, campaigns, and experiences for increased success. However, as data becomes all-pervasive, it becomes difficult to filter out the noise and adopt an efficient data-driven marketing strategy. 

Here’s a look at why companies should embrace data-driven marketing strategies to win big.

Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing Strategies

First, let’s begin by understanding the need for data-driven marketing strategies.

#1 Market to Target Audiences

Businesses can choose to cast a wide net and attract all sorts of traffic, or they could exploit data and adopt a focused approach to capture the ones that matter. The latter is preferable as it optimises spending, resources, and campaigns – and data is the compass leading in the right direction.

#2 Build Personalised Connections

Marketing to a target audience hedges the bets in your favour. However, data offers added granularity to the level of personalisation, so much so that it can even factor in individualistic likes, dislikes, and preferences for a unique customer experience! Seeing as 9 out of 10 consumers would spend more for such personalisation, data-driven marketing will have you cashing in cheques.

#3 Prioritise Marketing Channels

Digital marketing has unlocked a plethora of channels to market to audiences – and each of them comes at a price. However, not all channels carry equal weight, and not all of the 20-500 touchpoints translate into sales. Data-driven marketing assigns priorities to various marketing channels depending on customer data. As a result, businesses can connect with prospects and customers on their preferred turf and interact more meaningfully.

#4 Continuous Improvement

When companies start working with data (and witness the associated benefits), they will not only be encouraged to continue doing so but will be incentivised to improve data collection, storage, and processing capabilities. The resulting high-quality data will fetch even better results and trigger a positive feedback loop of continuous improvement.

#5 Higher Win Rates

Businesses that leverage data-driven marketing enjoy 5x to 8x more ROI than companies that lack these capabilities. This massive chasm in performance is very telling of how data-driven marketing propels success rates.

Data Types to Plan and Monitor Data-Driven Marketing Activities

Needless to say, data is the heart of all data-driven marketing strategies. As such, companies must focus on the right parameters to track, measure, and maximise impact. Here is a list of some key data sets.

• Market Trends: This data is a compilation of ongoing consumer behaviour, customer requirements, market gaps, and intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting demand-supply. It helps businesses stay competitive and relevant in a highly dynamic environment.
• Competitive Intelligence: This data lends insights into the existing and established competition in the segment. It contains details about competing organisations, such as their products or services, marketing strategies, market capitalisation, etc. It helps companies differentiate and make informed decisions.
• Demographic Data: This customer data contains statistical information revolving around the target audience’s age, gender, geographic location, and other characteristics that will determine how to best market to them.
• Psychographic Data: Such data captures the thoughts, beliefs, values, interests, preferences, and lifestyles of the audiences. Use it to emotionally connect with the target audience.
• Behavioural Data: Contains information about customer actions and interactions with a brand, behavioural patterns, and sentiments. It sheds light on opportunities to clinch a sale through personalised marketing.
• CRM Data: It is data originating from the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. It comprises name, contact details, purchase history, past interactions, engagement levels, and customer loyalty.
• Website/Social Media Analytics: These contain insights captured from website and social media platforms. It guides marketers in personalising and optimising content assets for higher engagement.
• Engagement Metrics: It measures the degree of engagement through quantifiable metrics such as email open rates, click-through rates, likes, shares, comments, etc., to monitor the effectiveness of marketing strategies.
• Content Performance Analytics: Since content marketing is a core component of data-driven marketing, marketers must also track and visualise data surrounding the effectiveness of the content assets.
• A/B Testing Data: Such data captures target audience preferences as it allows you to compare two strategies and assets.
• Feedback and Surveys: This contains data gathered from customer feedback and surveys. It provides valuable insights into customer satisfaction and areas of improvement.

Key Takeaways

Data-driven marketing allows brands to cater to specific customer requirements. Such customer-centricity attracts more or repeat business, fosters loyalty, and maximises the value proposition. However, for data-driven marketing to be truly effective, businesses have to measure the right data sets and metrics. These could be in the form of:

• Market trends
• Competitive intelligence
• Customer data
• CRM data
• Detailed analytics
• Feedback and surveys

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list by all means, and a lot depends on factors like the industry vertical, marketing strategies, digital maturity, target audience, etc. However, focusing on the right data will allow businesses to extract more value.

Drive Value With Data Experts From M&C Saatchi Performance

Data-driven marketing is a must for digital businesses. It catalyses revenue expansion by closely coupling appropriate marketing strategies with the target audience. It also boosts long-term organisational growth and sustainability.

However, the trick to achieving such results lies in finding the right kind of data. Our marketing experts can zero down on the right data sets and values depending on your target audience, business sector, and other such factors. Get in touch to know more.