Today, brands have access to a huge amount of customer data that allows them to understand and analyze customer behavior in-depth, as well as to create customer experiences tailored to their expectations. To grow your business and make the right strategic decisions, you need to implement a data-driven marketing strategy.
Our strategists at Eminence Agency are here to help you. In this article, they will share their top tips on how to can build a successful data-driven marketing strategy.
What is data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing is an approach that involves making strategic decisions based on collecting, organizing, analyzing, and interpreting data to better understand consumers and meet their expectations.
According to Statista’s Digital Economy Compass 2019, “the annual volume of digital data created globally has increased more than 20-fold over the past decade and is expected to approach 50 zettabytes by 2020.” That’s how important data is to the success and development of businesses.
The benefits of data-driven marketing:
A data-driven marketing strategy has several benefits, including:
- Delivering a relevant and personalized online shopping experience: with a data-driven strategy, companies can use this data to tailor their offerings and personalize their customers’ experiences.
- Increase engagement thanks to data: create personalized content based on visitors’ experiences and preferences. This enables you to use data to increase user engagement and get them to interact more with your brand by taking into account individual needs and aspirations.
- Refine customer experience: By testing both major and minor changes including A/B testing to your website you can analyze and enhance your user experience and customer journey. Take into account visitor feedback so that you can make informed decisions and improvements to their digital experience.
- Improve products and services according to customer expectations: using data, companies can understand their target audience and develop products adapted to a specific market.
- Create an omnichannel relationship with customers: by analyzing customer data, brands can identify the most effective channels and then deliver promotions and marketing campaigns in a more targeted way.
→ How to establish a winning Data-Driven strategy for your E-commerce?
The challenges of data-driven marketing:
To integrate a data-driven strategy, companies must face 3 major challenges:
- Data centralization: the first challenge is to centralize data that is often scattered throughout the organization’s information system, from CRM, Google Analytics, e-commerce, emailing, and marketing automation to social media, for example. This makes the information complicated to combine and analyze.
- Data that is kept up to date: data must be used in real-time for marketing actions. This requires the implementation of a process, and other data quality management procedures. Indeed, updating data can be particularly time-consuming if it is done manually and automating saves a lot of time.
- The creation of a data-driven culture within the company: this is the most difficult challenge, especially for larger companies. Moving to data-driven marketing requires cultural changes and new skills to be developed.
Here are examples of data-driven actions your company could leverage:
- Personalized product recommendation
Well-used data greatly facilitates the personalization of offers and product recommendations adapted to each customer’s profile. If one of your customers recently bought a pair of shoes, you can easily suggest complementary and similar products based on their search criteria.
- Automation of unique messages
By setting up different scenarios specific to the frequency and medium of choice of each customer contact, you can easily improve the effectiveness of your e-mail campaigns through an efficient data strategy. For example, if a customer has visited a product several times on your website, you will be able to program the sending of an automatic email or SMS to inform them of a possible stock shortage.
- Cross-segmenting to efficiently score your audience
Thanks to greatly centralized data, you will be able to visualize the different profiles of your audiences, including their personal information, their online and offline purchasing behavior, their behavior on the brand’s communication media, their product preferences, etc. All these elements will facilitate the creation of algorithms to score the audiences and from that even set up artificial intelligence (AI).
Read also: How to create a Data-Driven culture for your company?
How to implement an effective data-driven marketing strategy in a few steps?
- Set your goals:
Setting goals is the starting point for building your data-driven strategy. Indeed, data is the cornerstone of marketing objectives. You need to formulate, qualify and prioritize them to determine the data you need to collect and how you will use it to reach your objectives.
It is essential to select only the data that responds to a concrete problem within your company. Collecting as much data as possible without knowing how to use it can be costly in terms of time and money. So, you need to be able to identify your short and long-term goals and determine what data will help you achieve them.
- Collect and sort your data:
This step consists of sorting the data you have to identify the exploitable data such as sales data, transactional data, customer loyalty data, etc.
It is important to note that what counts is not the quantity of data, but the quality. It is therefore essential to collect the data that you have and that is hosted in different places.
- Equip yourself with the right marketing tools:
To collect and leverage customer data effectively, you need to equip yourself with marketing tools. Which tools you choose depends on the data you need to collect and the programs and scenarios you plan to implement.
One of the characteristics of data-driven companies is their ability to incorporate the data culture at all levels of the company. So, make sure you have the tools you need and involve your employees as much as possible in the digital transformation of your company. You can take an example from JCDecaux, known for its bus-stop advertising systems, billboards, public bicycle rental systems, and street furniture. This company uses data and communicates internally and externally about the benefits of using data in marketing. No one would have imagined linking JCDecaux and the word data. Yet they have successfully integrated it into the heart of their company and its culture.
- Test, learn and approve
Data has become ubiquitous in our society. It is important to use and understand data to perform in the digital world. It is important to take the time to analyze the results of your campaigns, detect possible problems, and learn more about your customers, their expectations and needs to make the necessary improvements to thrive in the digital era.