The Ins and Outs of Data-Driven Marketing

Author: Kaitlyn Partington Category: Marketing, Social Media & Digital Date: August 4, 2022

Businesses are always trying to get a leg up, to increase brand recognition and sales over their competitors. We also live in a time when we have a wealth of data available at our fingertips. When you combine the two, you get pure marketing magic – data-driven marketing. As with any powerful tool, you must use it the right way for it to be effective.

Data-driven marketing means basing your marketing strategy on data you have on your audience. Why is marketing data important? By digging into this data, you can better understand your customer’s preferences, interests, lifestyle, demographics, and buying habits. It also means you can tailor your outreach, like your advertising, content marketing, and social media, to make a connection and, hopefully, a sale.

Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing

Data-driven marketing has many advantages, including:

• A better, more tailored customer experience
• Evidence of ROI for your marketing efforts
• A stronger, longer-lasting connection with your customers
• Improved understanding of your most effective channels
• The ability to make better, more informed marketing decisions and anticipate future habits of your target audience

Challenges of Data-Driven Marketing

With all its assets, this approach does face some challenges:

• Consumer concerns over privacy and use of personal information
• Difficulty obtaining data and evaluating its quality
• Combining siloed data
• Complexity of analyzing data and applying it to trends in marketing

Crafting Your Marketing Strategy to Attract Customers

Here are the basic steps to developing a winning marketing data strategy.

1.   Establish your objectives. Before you start running after data, you need to know what you want it to do for you. Otherwise, how do you know you are collecting the right stuff?
2.   Collect the data. This is the part that can seem intimidating to many marketers. Do you know what the two main types of data in marketing are? One is in-house data, the data you are likely collecting already. In-house marketing data examples include email lists, website conversions, and social media engagement. Your customer relationship management (CRM) platform is another great resource. The other type of marketing data is third-party data. What are the sources of third-party marketing data? As you probably can guess – third parties. Third-party marketing data sources often gather data and sell it to companies for their marketing. This data can help fill in gaps that exist in your in-house data.
3.   Organize your data. It is often easiest to use a data platform.
4.   Analyze your data. Do you have what you need to reach your objectives? Evaluate your data for its accuracy, comprehensiveness, and consistency. Third-party data specialists can help with this as well.
5.   Coordinate your marketing activities. Develop your messaging and identify the marketing channels that will resonate best with your customers based on the data.
6.   Track your progress. You can’t know how effective your efforts are if you don’t measure them using marketing data analytics.

Data-Driven Marketing Tips

As you develop your data-driven marketing strategy, here are some things to keep in mind.

• Make sure you add value. The goal of your data collection should be to know your customer better so you can serve them better. The better your service, the greater the chance that you’ll make a sale. Consumers will be more comfortable providing their personal information if they think the reward is worth it.
• Prioritize transparency. A great way to alleviate consumer privacy concerns is by being upfront and honest about what information you are collecting, how you will and will not use it, and how you will store it securely.
• Build in multiple touchpoints. Consumers are inundated by brands daily. Standing out will take time, and you will probably have to be seen more than once before you break through.
• Break down your lists. Segment your lists so you can tailor your outreach based on your relationship with each customer.
• Use the data to connect your marketing and sales teams. Your data can help to bridge the gap between the two teams.

Data-driven marketing allows you to capture the power of information to enhance consumer engagement and reach your business goals. At Paradigm, we love data. We specialize in marketing strategy development, creating and executing cohesive plans and campaigns that drive customer awareness. We utilize various marketing disciplines and leverage each to achieve business growth and profitability for our clients through our strategic marketing consulting services. If we can help propel your data-driven marketing, please contact us today.