How to Build a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy

Today’s savvy marketer understands that gut instinct and traditional methods are not effective anymore. The stakes have risen too high and the consequences are too scary to do anything rather than moving your best foot forward behind every marketing campaign.

Effective marketing strategies help businesses to grow. Companies need to focus on data and action to ensure their marketing team is contributing to your business at their best. You can make all the weakness and strength of your company clearly visible with the help of a data-driven marketing strategy. What this means is that you can make strategic decisions that will enable your business highly successful.

Today, using data is imperative for every business. It’s not a matter of,“if”or“of”, instead it is a matter of how. If your company is still in the stage of figuring out whether to use data or not, then let us tell you, that you are lagging behind. And to close this gap would be an additional challenge to tackle. But if you fall in the “how” category, meaning you have started but need help with proper implementation, execution, and optimization then you are at the right place.

Read the article further to understand why data is imperative to business and how to build an effective data-driven marketing strategy along with the limitation of data-driven marketing.

Today, data is omnipresent and is being used by all the departments in a company. Whether it’s the sales, marketing, customer support, or the customer success department, everyone is using data. We will keep our focus on the sales and marketing departments which further can be applied to a different department as well. First, let’s understand what data-driven marketing is, and why it is the need of the hour?

Data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing is the process of using prospect and customer data for targeted and optimized campaigns, media buying, and creative messaging. Data-driven marketing is believed to be one of the most transformational changes in the digital advertising landscape.

The process of data-driven marketing requires having an understanding of your existing data, the data you will gather in the future, and an understanding of how to organize, analyze, and apply your data to make your marketing efforts more efficient. The primary reason why businesses use data-driven marketing is to personalize and improve their customer experience.

The significant rise in the quality and quantity of marketing data has given way to the high growth in the technologies for creative production and automation. As a result, MarTech and AdTech have enabled personalization on a very granular level for every aspect of marketing.

Data-driven marketing provides the answers of who, where, when, and what for your prospect and customers. It helps you to make an informed decision that is actionable as it is based on actionable data.

Now, the first step in building a data-driven marketing strategy is to build a team. Once you have assembled your team, move to the next steps described below;

Set your goals

Start off by deciding what type of data you need for your sales and marketing strategies. Focus on collecting data that is relevant for your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)to attain a positive impact on your efforts. Exclude data that is not updated as it won’t increase the results of your campaigns.

Collect your data

Before you start collecting data, make sure entire data will be placed in a single place for better analysis. Then you can start collecting data for the following types;

•    Customer data
•    Prospect data
•    Target market
•    Competitors
•    Marketing and social media analytics
•    Qualitative data and other types that is relevant to your KPIs.

After exploring the data, you can better understand what is happening at each level of the customer lifecycle, which includes information like problems at the point of sale, complaints or service calls, referrals and subsequent purchases, and online recommendations.

Analyze your data; it’s time for action

Now, it’s time to take action! Start analyzing your data against your KPIs. Use this data for building your marketing strategy and making smart sales and marketing decisions.

Just follow the succeeding steps;

Refine your marketing strategy

You may already be using various channels of marketing like content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, etc. Now that you have data, get very granular in your targeting approach. Develop a clear strategy about whom you are trying to target and what is needed to reach and convey your message to this refined audience. Just be consistent in your approach and you will be on the road to success in no time. The first sign of success is engagement. When a prospect or customer get what they want, they are very likely to reciprocate.

Look for new market

It’s a very good idea to use the insight from your data and use it to find new markets or submarkets for your solutions. There are always new opportunities; you just have to look in the right place. Use data to find new horizons for your solutions.

Remove customer pain point

Use data to establish what are the pain points of your prospects and customers. Now, figure out a way to address these problems. Look at your customer’s feedback, testimonials, and reviews alongside your customer and prospect data. This will help you to create an effective strategy to reduce (or even remove) your prospect and customer pain points.

Try different marketing channels

Just by using your website to share your solutions to your target audience, you cannot make your business sustainable. Use your ideal customer profile (ICP) to find where your prospects and customers are. Based on the finding of this result, use various channels to market and sell your solutions. Then based on the engagement from each channel you can prioritize where and how much to invest your money and your time, on these channels.

Benefits of data-driven marketing

Digital transformation has changed the way companies are doing marketing. Now, savvy marketers are adapting to a more efficient form of marketing, known as data-driven marketing. There are numerous benefits of using data-driven marketing, the top ones are following;

Personalize content and campaigns

Personalization has changed the way companies do marketing. Using data-driven marketing approach, you effectively target your prospect and customer by talking about their need, preferences, and interest. As a result, your chances of engaging with your prospects and customers improve. Leaving you with a lower churn rate, higher ROI, better customer retention, more qualified leads, and many more.

When you introduce personalization into your marketing campaigns, you can get the most out of it and you improve your chances of success. More than 50% of the marketers have recorded a 20% improvement in their KPIs.

Let’s consider an email campaign for example;

You can easily write an email copy that focuses on your customers need, preferences, and interest for a specific segment of your recipients. With the help of data-driven marketing leveraging marketing automation, you can easily personalize your messages for each recipient.

Personalization delivers better customer experience

More than 80% of the customers are more likely to do business with your company if your company provides personalized experiences. Now, customers don’t just expect a personalized experience, customers are greatly disappointed if they don’t get a personalized experience. So, ensure each of your marketing campaigns is personalized, even when if you just personalizing your marketing campaigns using the first name.

Personalization delivers better ROI

By identifying and engaging on the preferred channel for your prospect and customers, you can improve your ROI. Using the right automation tool, you can easily identify which channels are best to  engage with your prospect and customer and then follow-up across every channel like an omnichannel approach.

Build consistency across channels

Today, prospects and customers are engaging with companies across many channels like social media, email, website, etc. This is why it is imperative for companies to build and maintain consistency across every channel. So, the app experience should match the in-store experience of a prospect or customer and both experiences should match with their experience from your email, and so on.

Remarketing to Your Website Visitors

There is a very thin line between remarketing and personalization. Remarketing is the process of targeting prospects and customers who have shown any interest in your product, service or solution. Like when a user visits your website, engages with your campaign, etc. For example, you can set up tracking for specific pages of your website or landing page to identify people who have interacted but didn’t get converted. Now using the remarketing technique, you can target these users across channels, encouraging them to complete the action.

Following are the best ways to get the most out of your remarketing strategy;

Provide relevant recommendations to your customer

It is highly likely that after visiting a company website you may have seen their ad either on Google partner network websites, social media, etc. Even if you did not have encountered, the fact is it was not a coincidence, it was because of remarketing. It is a highly used go-to strategy to target users who have shown any interest in your product or service and encourage them into making a purchase using personalized content.

In the targeting approach of your remarketing campaigns, you can also use email when you have their contact data. For example; your company sells analytics tools. So, when a user visits your site and starts comparing the different features you have for different price and leaves without making a purchase. Now, with the help of remarketing you can target them with alternatives that are highly suited for their need, a different pricing option, a trial option, depending on why they did not make the purchase in the first place. Depending on the data you have for these users, you can target them via email, on LinkedIn, or through Google ads.

Engage when they are in the mood to buy

Time is of paramount importance when you are doing marketing. Depending on your industry, location, product or service, there are specific times when your buyers in a better mood to buy. For example, the customers who either visited your website or walked into your physical store are more likely to engage with your messages on the same day.

Send reminders

Data-driven marketing also provides unique opportunities that would not have existed otherwise by using purchase history data. You can start a customer loyalty program, identify the time when your  customers make a purchase and then send them personalized recommendations in that specific time frame.

You can also send them reminders when their service period is about to expire or their trial is about to complete. For example, you are selling website hosting service and you found out that you have thousands of customers whose plan is about to expire in the next month. You can create a reminder or series of reminders to be sent over a specific interval of time to inform them exactly when their plan is going to expire and what they can do for uninterrupted service.

Understand your customer behaviors

To sell effectively to your customers, you need to know about their behavior patterns. As a savvy marketer, the more you know about your customer’s purchase decision, the more you can sell them irrespective of the type and size of your company.

To keep your customers satisfied you have to deliver on their expectation. The simple way to do so is by using market research data. You can run a survey, asking questions to your customers about their satisfaction level, areas of improvements, best and worst thing of your product, service or solution.

You don’t need a psychic to figure out what your prospect and customer will do in the future. All you need is a data-driven marketing strategy to understand their current behavior and make an accurate prediction about their future behavior. For example; there are multiple buttons with a call to action (CTA) having different click-through rates (CTRs) and several web-pages on your website. Which button has the highest CTR? Which CTA button is the lowest performer? What is the average number of web-page visited by a user? Which web-page seems to act as an exit door to your website visitors? Only after analyzing your user’s behavior on your website, you can predict and find opportunities for improvement for better engagement with your website visitors.

Know where your customers are:

To make your company sustainable and your business successful, it is imperative to know about your customers like, who are they? Where are they coming from?  Where do they live? What do they need? etc. Understanding your customers better is the key element in providing them what they actually need. However, understanding your customer’s behavior pattern is not easy and requires a thorough analysis to identify their preferences and behavior pattern to understand their actual need and meet their expectation. Data-driven marketing lets you know all these and more, literally. For instance, by identifying your customer location data, you get to know where they actually live. Then you can use this data to target user to make a purchase at your physical store closest to their location or you can encourage your prospects to visit your physical store closet to them to try or just check your products (as some people prefers to buy from a physical store after seeing your product in person and some prefers to buy from online stores).

You can target your user based on their country, state, city, or zip code, etc. You can better segment your customers and create effective targeting strategies. Then, the cultural or regional differences of your customers have to be taken into account as it may highly impact your marketing efforts.

Using data-driven marketing tools you can easily find where your customers are online as well as offline. It is very useful to have the location of your prospects & customers and how are they coming to your website like either they are coming from social media channels, your emails, and some other

website or directly, etc. This will enable you to tailor future marketing efforts and campaigns. You can collect the following data;

•    Where are they accessing your website?
•    How are they accessing your website (like device, browser, etc)?
•    Are they coming from your organic search result? If so, what was the keyword they used?
•    Did they found one of social media post that encouraged them to visit your website?
•    How much time they are spending on your website?
•    What are they doing on your website (like visiting your company product page, resource page, about us page or contact us page, etc)?
•    Which pages are acting like an exit door to your customers?

Find out what’s working and what’s not:

Long gone are the days when the biggest challenge for a company was to develop a product that would very successful. Now the biggest challenge for a company is to market the product. Product development is still very critical but doesn’t top product marketing.

We are living in a data-driven economy where companies use data to make an informed decision about what’s working and what’s not.

One of the core benefits of data-driven marketing you can collect hard data (contract data, demographic data, etc) and soft data (surveys, feedback, reviews, etc) to decide what’s working and what’s not. And to get the most out of your marketing efforts, you have to make the required optimization when they fail. On the other hand, when you are successful with a plan, you need to stick to it and put more efforts into making this plan more successful.

Make developments:

If you know about what your customers actually want, only then you should make developments to your product or service to meet their expectations. And if you don’t know what your customers want, the best way is just to ask them.

Data-driven marketing enables to develop a better understanding of your target audience by surveys, feedbacks, polls, live support chats, email inquiry, etc. These data can provide you information about the developments of your product or service for specific market segments.

Else, you can use automation tools for reporting to find out your most successful product and market segment for the same and vice versa.

Limitations of data-driven marketing strategy:

With marketers focusing on data-driven strategies to achieve their goals, creativity no longer drives the message.  Conversion rates, clicks, time spent, etc only tells you what users do, not why they do it.

Developing and achieving a data-driven marketing strategy can be challenging. The most common issues are;

•    Lack of contact data
•    Lack of real-time data
•    Lack of customer focus
•    Lack of technology
•    Lack of cohesion between teams

To develop a sustainable and scalable data-driven marketing strategy you need the right data and technology.

Suggestions for optimization and investments:

Data is always telling a story only if you are listening. There could be a number of reasons for your data-driven marketing strategy to fail including the data and the technology needed to execute your strategy efficiently.

Start evaluating the technology needed for the proper execution, and finalize it once you have found a technology that could help you execute your strategy.

Ensure you have accurate prospect and customer contact data to start your data-driven marketing approach. If not, then start evaluating the data companies who can provide you accurate b2b contact data. You can also contact Infotanks Media to acquire highly accurate B2B contact data. If you have in-house data of your prospects or customers but are missing key information or the data is inaccurate, you can use our data appending service and turn your old data into highly accurate data.