In the Data Driver’s Seat
Data-driven marketing is on the rise, and it’s changing the way that companies around the world are doing business.
Thanks to the wealth of available information about how customers—and potential customers—behave online, marketing has been moving from the field of art to that of science. Data-driven marketing is on the rise, and it’s changing the way that companies around the world are doing business. Because it provides the kind of insights that make marketing communication more effective and delivers a significant return on investment (ROI), it has captured the attention of brand managers and decision makers alike.
Simply put, data-driven marketing analyzes how customers interact and engage with a brand using big data methods, such as algorithms and machine learning.
What Data-Driven Marketing Can Do for Your Brand
Of course, with every trend that makes its way through the business world, there is always the need to ask, “Is this a trend I want to follow?” But when you think about the potential benefits of data-driven marketing, it’s clear that you should be figuring out how to make it a part of your strategy for the future.
Just collecting data and analyzing customer insights and trends will not do. Companies should be willing to take risks, try different approaches and be quick to improvise their marketing plans and strategies to achieve ROI.
Make it personal. Data-driven marketing gives you the ability to personalize messages to your customers. It lets you know how to segment your customers and target them with individualized messages based around the kinds of products or services they have bought in the past or that they’ve shown interest in.
Don’t just decide on a hunch. Data-driven techniques can tell you who you should market to, what kind of content you should be sending to your target market, and even ways you might be able to improve your product or service to better serve your target market. And all of these decisions can be based on the analysis of how your customers actually behave when they interact with your brand.
Know exactly how customers are finding you. All customers take different paths to your product or service. Some may find you through a Google search, while others will reach you via social media. Knowing more about the journeys that customers have taken—from being curious about what you have to offer to actually purchasing it—allows you to make yourself more appealing to future customers.
Keep them coming back. Rewarding regular customers with personalized messages or creating content that will keep potential customers on your website are ideal ways to drive your business. Knowing who those customers are and what that content should look like are just two of the things you can learn with a data-driven approach to marketing.
Sticking to the Discipline of Data
All of these benefits can drastically improve the ROI of your marketing efforts. But it’s not necessarily easy to make the leap from more traditional marketing methods to a data-driven approach.
As Custom Media President Robert Heldt explained, “Just collecting data and analyzing customer insights and trends will not do. Companies should be willing to take risks, try different approaches and be quick to improvise their marketing plans and strategies to achieve ROI. At Custom Media, our team of digital experts and strategists help companies navigate this data minefield day in, day out, focusing on customer engagement while delivering value-added solutions to end users and companies.”
You need to work with people who have the right skill set, and who understand the technical methods behind data-driven marketing. You also need to be ready to commit to the approach and give it the opportunity to succeed for you. It’s a matter of constantly looking for new ways to interpret all of the data that customers are generating when they are interacting with your brand and making constant adjustments to how you’re communicating with customers—from the time of day that you put out ads to the kind of content that you create. Sticking to the discipline of data-driven marketing may not be easy, but it has the potential to transform your brand and take it to new heights.
Are you ready to harness the power of data-driven marketing? If you’d like to partner with a digital agency that does it right, contact us at: inquiries@custom-media.com
