Marketing is a vast industry. And with technology ever-advancing, there are always new ways to capture data and personalize your business’s advertising. Data-driven marketing is a newish term related to how businesses can use data to create more effective advertising for their customers.
In today’s article, we’ll discuss what this technique is, how it works, and its benefits.
What is Data-Driven Marketing?
What used to be an innovative and advanced way to create marketing is now almost a necessity. Data-driven marketing is built into a business’s core brand strategy and, as such, carves its way into every piece of marketing you put out.
By definition, this type of marketing uses the analysis of ‘big data’ to create useful insights into your customers. Big data is often collected through interactions with consumers. This data is then used to create predictions about the behaviors of consumers in the present and future. By studying your current customers’ behaviors and combining them with the data you can access from other studies and statistics, you can start to build a marketing strategy that will capture your audience in the right place at the right time.
Traditional marketing would follow a ‘one size fits all’ style, with the same marketing assets being used across offline and online advertising streams without much consideration for screen size, audience, or demographic.
In its simplest form, data-driven marketing could include finding out what times of day most people are online and setting your ads to only run during this period. There’s no point paying to advertise your brand at 6 am if nobody will see it.
Data-driven marketing has increased the need for personalization and made it much easier for businesses to incorporate it into their existing strategies.
Easy to Implement Data-Driven Marketing
Sounds scary and confusing, right? Well, the good news is, your business is probably already using data-driven marketing without you realizing it.
Simple examples of data-driven marketing are part of the norm these days, so if you’re using retargeting, dynamic ads, or targeted email campaigns, you’re already off to a good start.
If you’re not sure what any of the above means, here’s a little explanation:
Retargeting
Retargeting ads are essentially ads that follow you around online. If you’ve been looking at a specific product on a website, more often than not, you’ll notice an advertisement for the same item suddenly in your social media feed or on Google. This is done by a website collecting your data to help display the most relevant ads to you.
Dynamic Advertising
When using platforms like Facebook Ads manager, or Google Ads, you’ll have seen the ‘dynamic ad’ option. This means that you enter some details about your campaign, a tagline, a picture, and the Ads manager will take care of the rest. It’ll adapt your campaign to fit mobile and desktop, and also display ads differently depending on where they’re viewed; Instagram stories, Facebook feed, banners, etc.
Targeted Emailing
If you’ve segmented your email subscribers into different interests or demographics, you’re already working with data-driven marketing. By targeting certain people with certain emails, you’re using the data you have available to adapt your campaigns accordingly.
Why Should I Use Data-Driven Marketing?
There are many benefits to using data-driven marketing, all of which can really help set you apart from your competitors.
Personalization & Segmentation
We’ve already mentioned this buzz word a few times in this article, and you can find out more about personalization in our previous post here. Using data, marketing companies find ways to convey different messages to different people — making your catchment audience much bigger. Your business might sell various products, all for different people, so how do you expect one ad message to entice everyone? The simple answer is that you can’t. But rather than choosing what to advertise and accept a drop in sales for other departments, personalization can help you push the right products to the right people, in the right place, at the right time. That’s a lot of ‘right’ that you could be doing…
With a deeper understanding of your audience, you can segment different target groups and display the perfect message for each. This will help improve conversion metrics, as well as ROI and customer loyalty. Find out more about what metrics you should measure in our guide here.
Create a multi-channel presence
With the use of data analysis, businesses can create automated campaigns that adapt to the channel they’re displayed on. Automation will place ads in the right place to reach your customer at any given time. It’sThis level of ‘on it’ marketing can transform your campaign message’s effectiveness.
No longer is offline and email marketing enough; ads need to be across every social media channel, website, search engine, and more.
Improved Shopping Experience
You can use data from your competitors or create your own survey to find out where your customer’s shopping experience is failing. You can get a lot of insight into your website’s workings through a simple questionnaire, and people are usually more than happy to help with improving your services.
This data can allow you to make changes to your current site navigation and create a smoother and faster way for customers to shop. This improved functionality will then create a better shopping journey, which in turn will lead to more customer loyalty.
Better product launches
If you’re using data within your marketing, you’ll quickly see which products aren’t quite right for your target audience. With this, you’ll be able to improve your current range, find out what’s missing, and also launch products that suit your customer that little bit better.
How to introduce data-driven marketing
Introducing new marketing strategies can be pretty tricky and difficult to understand if you’re just starting out. Certain technologies can help with implementing your strategy and ways to make your marketing department work together to create the best outcome for the business.
Automation Tools
These types of tools will help keep things ticking over the day today. By integrating technology to help the running of your marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to stick to objectives and avoid getting inconsistent results. Staff can focus on analyzing the effectiveness of campaigns while the automation tools take care of the implementation.
Cross-Departmental Data Sharing
If you’re collating data, you should make sure that everyone in the business has access — that means the whole marketing team, category, sales, and anyone else who might find it useful. If the whole company isn’t using the same set of data, strategies, and campaigns will be inconsistent and can be difficult to measure effectively.
Analyze Your Competitors
You should always take the time to get to know your competitors: Learn how their website works, figure out what their current marketing strategy looks like, and read the comments on ads via social media to see if the messaging is really resonating with their customer. Any level of weakness is an opportunity for you to steal their customer.
Without understanding what your competitors are doing, it’s impossible to ever be one step ahead. A little bit of stalking is the key to your success.
It’s also worth making sure your team is staying up to date with the latest trends and technology advancements so that you can adapt your current brand strategy accordingly.
Monitor Results
There is still an element of trial and error with data-driven marketing, which is why you should dedicate some of your time or part of your team to monitoring campaigns’ success while they’re still running. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, and as such, there are huge differences in what works and what doesn’t from industry to industry.
By continuously monitoring your own campaigns, you can identify areas to improve and fix them while there’s still time. It’ll also help you focus your budget on the right strategies so you’re not wasting money on ineffective campaigns.
So, if you’re not already using any form of data-driven marketing, it’s really time to put plans in place. Check out your competitors, understand what tools are available, and learn as much as possible about your current customers. Start with small implementations such as retargeting and dynamic ads to help you get started.
