Are your marketing efforts creative, yet falling short? Do you continuously try new strategies with little to no results?
Data-driven marketing can help.
Data-driven marketing is a technique which leverages information collected from a variety of sources to improve marketing efforts. It creates an actionable plan to experiment and test marketing strategies. In essence, it takes the guesswork out of marketing and turns it into a science.
Data-driven marketing is now a requirement for any business that truly wants to be successful. This is especially true in the Digital Marketing Age where data is abundant. To not use the data could mean applying one strategy after another without truly knowing what works and what doesn’t.
Data-driven marketing can be used in email campaigns, target audience research, and social media campaigns. It can also be useful for improving your business’s website, brand awareness, and sales.
So, how can data-driven marketing help your business to reach your most ambitious goals?
Read on to find out how data-driven marketing can help you to get the results you need and the growth you want.
From Data to Strategy: The Top Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing
Many people would argue that marketing is a multidisciplinary field. It’s about understanding people, understanding results, and creating a formula for success. But, all successful marketers know that creativity, data, and experimentation can coexist.
Explore the following benefits of data-driven marketing so you can start to use this important aspect of marketing to your advantage.
1. Direction
A marketing plan without data is missing an important key factor to success. While trial and error may suffice, using data to your benefit is much more likely to be successful. Data-driven marketing puts goals, information, and measurable analytics at the forefront of the marketing campaign.
These days marketing isn’t just about idealism or hoping for the best. At least, it doesn’t have to be. With data-driven marketing, you’ll get a better idea of what works, what doesn’t, and what strategies to use in the future.
Having direction puts your business’s need for growth and results at the forefront of the discussion. Data-driven measurements can provide your business with many directions for growth leading to increased sales, brand awareness, and/or more customers.
When you know what your weak points and strengths are by assessing the data, you’re able to move your business into the next stage of growth. Data can make all the difference and it’s widely available to provide you with important insights and information.
2. Market Segmentation
Data-driven marketing can help you to personalize your marketing efforts and connect with your customers more effectively.
Data can help you to understand your customer, their wants and needs, and their demographics. When you understand these key factors, you can then begin to discover how to solve their pain points and what their interests are. This data collection can then lead to personalization and market segmentation.
For example, how much money does your target audience make? Who is your current target audience and what are their lifestyles like?
By discovering answers through data to questions like these, you can improve your marketing plan. This can also lead to more opportunities to personalize and market to specific groups within your target audience through segmentation.
Segmentation is a result of understanding the data related to your audience. When the data shows that a portion of your audience is interested in one facet of your business, then you can send them information that is relevant to these interests. This can increase conversion rates, click-through-rates, and sales.
Whatever your key performance indicators are, segmentation and personalization can help you to reach your performance goals. It can also increase your brand awareness and customer loyalty, lead generation, and engagement.
Dive Deeper:
- Our growth agency has directly driven over 20 million in revenue for our clients, here are my top lessons
- Mastering performance marketing: the power of ROI measurement and attribution
- The CMO’s Role in Creating Enterprise Value: Everything You Need to Know
- How we help HR-Tech SaaS Scale-ups overcome growth challenges
- How to Work with AI as a Marketer: Our Top Team Advice
3. Deeper Understanding of Your Market
We all want to understand our target audience and market. We need to understand our business inside out, the current market, and factors affecting these components to employ successful marketing campaigns.
Data helps us to understand our markets, businesses, and customers on a deeper level. When we understand these elements, we can then adjust our strategies, marketing plans, and resource allocation. We can then capitalize on our marketing budgets.
Data that leads to a deeper understanding of the market could be target audience demographics, A/B testing, and click-through-rates. When the data suggests that a strategy could be improved, then we can try out new ways to meet our goals. Data can also affect the way you sell to the customer, your brand awareness, and the way your customers interact with your company.
Data collection isn’t limited to our own businesses either. Data collection can also help us to understand our competitors. By understanding our competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, we can then adjust our own marketing strategies to improve our marketing campaigns.
4. Actionable Steps
Data provides businesses with actionable steps to take to reach their goals. By analyzing data from past marketing successes and failures, we can then create a series of marketing strategies. These strategies will address our failures and prop up our successes even more.
When a weakness is identified from the data, then marketers can conduct a controlled experiment to amend the issue. It may be a simple tweak in keyword usage or the placement of an image, but through a data-driven experiment, we can see if the issue is resolved. If the issue isn’t resolved, then another marketing strategy or adjustment can be employed.
This gives marketers and businesses an action plan for success. It may take time and effort to see results, but the data tells us where we need to focus our attention and act. The data also provides us with a way to further our business goals instead of scratching our heads trying to solve the problem without knowledge of what the problem is in the first place.
5. Improved SEO
Search engine optimization is an aspect of marketing that is important for a company’s success. Search engine optimization helps your website, social media content, and other online business information to be ranked higher by search engines. The algorithms used by search engines change frequently, but data can help you to keep up with these changes and improve your rankings.
SEO marketing is a popular and highly utilized marketing strategy. While it can require sifting through tedious amounts of data and information, it can improve your marketing efforts substantially.
By analyzing the data related to keyword usage, loading times, and overall user-friendliness you can improve your customer experience, conversion rates, and visibility.
6. Improved Conversion Rates
Conversion rates are essential to campaigns looking to improve sales, leads, and views.
Conversion rates indicate that your marketing efforts are leading people to act in the way you want them to. Conversion rates also reflect how well your marketing strategies are working. Some conversion goals include prompting a customer to fill out a form, download content, or contact your business.
Data-driven marketing can help you to improve your conversion rates by showing you what’s working and what isn’t working. It can show you that you need to make adjustments in a timely manner instead of continuing on with a strategy that isn’t producing your desired results.
You can then employ various conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies. These include creating a landing page, A/B testing, and conducting additional target audience research to make sure your marketing is reaching the right consumers.
7. Greater ROI
Marketing can be a business’s largest expense. Put your marketing budget to good use by using data to back up your marketing claims, plans, and strategies. Doing so will result in a great return on your investment and better use of your resources for future campaigns.
You’ll receive a greater return on your investment because you’ll understand where your money is best spent. Instead of trying one costly campaign after another, you can utilize the data to find out where the money will be most useful.
Using data to test one strategy at a time will also help your budget. As the data proves the strategy’s success, you can then implement another strategy to your marketing plan. This will give you a toolkit of proven marketing strategies that empirically show that the campaign is worthy of investing in again in the future.
But, if a strategy seems to be failing, then you can simply try another tactic. This prevents you from overinvesting in a marketing plan before it’s actually proven to work.
8. Knowledge for the Future
Gaining knowledge for future marketing campaigns is paramount to your success. Data-driven marketing will help you to predict future results and be more prepared for future marketing campaigns.
The data you gather from past campaigns along with market research and trends create a map for future marketing campaigns. And unless you cultivate a timeless brand, then you’ll need to be prepared to adjust using the data you acquire.
Think of data as a way to connect. As you connect the data to actionable marketing strategies, you create the future of your business and connect more with customers. And, with a solid, data-driven marketing plan, your future should reflect growth, success, and a larger customer base.
Data can also help you to predict what your customers will be interested in in the future. This type of data can be gathered from surveys, polls, or conversations with customers and it can help you to improve your business processes and products. It could also help you to create new products and meet the additional needs of your customers within your market.
While it can be daunting to receive honest feedback from your customers, knowing how they view your products and services can help you to grow in the long-term. It can also help you to adjust your current marketing strategies and sales tactics.
Gathering data like customer feedback will help you to develop a growth strategy tailored to the future of your business. Other strategies like lead generation, user acquisition, and content strategy based on the data will also help you to grow as a business.
Dive Deeper:
- Our growth agency has directly driven over 20 million in revenue for our clients, here are my top lessons
- Mastering performance marketing: the power of ROI measurement and attribution
- The CMO’s Role in Creating Enterprise Value: Everything You Need to Know
- How we help HR-Tech SaaS Scale-ups overcome growth challenges
- How to Work with AI as a Marketer: Our Top Team Advice
9. Increase in Sales
Data can reveal where you can improve your sales. It can show you how to upsell, cross-sell, and appeal to the needs of customers. It can also help you to identify what discounts to offer, products to launch, and ads to invest in.
By analyzing data such as previous purchases and abandoned carts, you can then determine how to convert additional sales. For example, would a coupon influence the customer to return to their abandoned cart? Would a customer who purchased an item be interested in a complementary product?
Most businesses want to increase their revenue. Data-driven marketing can help businesses to achieve this by shedding light on where their sales process is falling short. Data allows you to examine potential causes so that you can then determine a list of solutions.
Once the data shows the possible solutions, then you can test these solutions to see which is the most successful. Using the data, you can test and re-test until you improve your sales process and increase your revenue.
Data-Driven Marketing: Putting Knowledge to Good Use
Data-driven marketing won’t be effective if a marketing team doesn’t understand how to interpret the data. Data-driven marketing requires an ability to connect the dots and then make sound marketing decisions. It also requires a marketing team to know what data to seek out.
Marketing occurs on a broad scope. It’s an art form and a science and it requires a variety of skills and knowledge. Make sure to have a data-driven marketing expert in your corner to maximize your marketing efforts.
Need a team of scientific marketers? At The Growth Agency, we use data-driven marketing strategies to help businesses reach their goals. Talk to a TGA Strategist to see if you qualify for a free growth audit!
