Six tips on how to create a data-driven marketing strategy
Data-driven marketing is an approach businesses can use to maximise their communication and visibility through the use of data.
Thanks to the rise of e-commerce, consumer patterns, habits, and trends are now easily trackable. The massive amount of data that is recorded from a customer journey allows companies to segment users and target them effectively.
Essentially, data helps companies understand their customer better. And if you know your customer, you are halfway to targeting them and hopefully, converting them into a sale. Data-driven marketing has opened up a world of possibilities for marketers. Here are a few tips on how to harness that potential.
Personalisation
It’s crucial to personalise the customer experience. With data-driven marketing, consumer information allows you to gain an in-depth understanding of your audience, and tailor their experience based on their preferences. The greater the understanding, the stronger the relationship and in turn, greater success.
Utilise real-time data
Real-time data and current analytics can help your business respond to customer needs and preferences, and even anticipate your customer’s needs.
Giving potential leads what they want, exactly when they are looking for it, simplifies their experience with your company, and creates a positive customer-company relationship.
Use technology to measure data
Embracing technology and automation wherever possible will speed up and improve time-intensive processes, such as measuring and optimising a customer’s lifetime value. This is a far more beneficial exercise than simply focusing on the ‘quick wins’ of short-term sales or conversions.
Chatbots and virtual assistants
The use of voice and visual search, chatbots, and virtual assistants can give businesses the opportunity to interact with customers in a more authentic and intuitive way. They offer information efficiently and will be able to provide many of the answers that a customer is looking for.
Varied sources
Utilising multiple sources such as social media, email, and your website will help you to build a unified view of the customer and inform your decision-making. Each platform can attract a different audience, and this allows data marketers to tailor their content to consumer preferences. If you can present a solution to your audience, they will feel like the content has been made for them.
Potential challenges and how to avoid them
While data-driven marketing has huge potential, there are a few pitfalls and challenges you may encounter when building out your strategy.
For starters, collecting data from each platform you use can be time-consuming and tedious if done manually. To mitigate this, it’s essential to implement innovative analytics software, which can help you process your data and guarantee accuracy.
Once you have gathered the data, it needs to be proactively managed to ensure it aligns with the goals and key performance indicators of the overarching strategy. Creating a data marketing dashboard can also help prioritise the current, real-time data that you generate.
What does the future hold for data-driven marketing?
Looking to the future of data-driven marketing, research suggested artificial intelligence will be adopted by more teams as a way to analyse or make sense of large amounts of data, as well as automate and optimise marketing decisions.
Future developments are likely to be defined by the ability to harness insights from vast amounts of data and use them to create more personalised, relevant, and effective marketing experiences for customers.
Looking for your next big role in this fast-moving sector, or need to source exceptional talent? Take a look at our latest Data jobs or get in touch with one of our expert consultants to find out more.