Businesses now have access to extensive data on the identity, behaviour or preferences of their customers. However, such data still needs to be collected, processed and analysed in order to implement relevant measures. This is what a data-driven marketing strategy is all about: Effectively managing data to better understand customers and implement more effective campaigns.
What is a data-driven marketing strategy?
Literally, Data-Driven Marketing is marketing that is based on data. It refers to a strategy in which every decision is supported by Big Data. In other words, the company uses the extensive data at its disposal to produce reliable statistics and forecasts that help define its major strategic orientations.
Leveraging customer data has become a key issue for organizations. As consumers become increasingly ‘overwhelmed’ with advertising, it becomes essential to customize and target marketing campaigns, in order to deliver the right message to the right person, at the most appropriate time.
With readily available purchase history, web browsing history, socio-demographic data, points of interest, etc., the marketing department can offer a customer experience that is tailored to suit each consumer.
However, to implement a data-driven marketing strategy, good data management is required. The data must be perfectly exploitable, while complying with regulations. Beyond data governance, real technical expertise is necessary to manage and develop a data marketing tool while taking into account the company’s objectives.
Finally, regular analyses are essential to get the most out of the data, effectively manage the strategy and implement corrective measures if necessary.
Implementing a data-driven strategy
To deploy your digital strategy effectively, it is important to respect a few key steps.
Define your KPIs and objectives
First, make sure you define the objectives of your marketing strategy, such as name recognition, conversion, lead generation, or a little of all of these at the same time. In any case, the SMART method is recommended to set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and temporally defined goals.
Next, you need to identify key performance indicators (KPI) to manage your strategy on a daily basis. There is a wide variety of indicators, including open rate, click-through rate, number of visitors on your site, conversion rate, and cost per click. It is up to you to choose the most appropriate ones according to your objectives and the marketing tools used.
Collecting and processing data
To set up a data-driven management system for your business, you need to exploit the various data sources at your disposal. From contact forms on your website to email exchanges, social media and white paper downloads, there are many ways to collect data. Again, you need to select the most appropriate ones based on your set objectives.
It is then necessary to process the data efficiently and to represent it using dashboards. It is essential to implement these management and decision support tools to monitor your various KPIs, and therefore to manage your marketing performance on a daily basis.
Indeed, data visualization (dataviz) enables you to analyze the results of your campaigns using an intuitive and fun interface. In other words, dashboards transform your numerous and scattered data into perfectly intelligible information.
Monitoring and optimizing your marketing strategy
To monitor your data marketing strategy, it is not enough to design management tools (such as dashboards); the company’s organization must also be rethought.
In particular, project leaders may be designated to oversee key actions under the strategy. In conjunction with operations teams, managers, and even management departments such as the IT department, they must regularly review whether the objectives set have been achieved.
In addition, it is important to conduct experiments to identify new opportunities and improve the strategy as time goes on. For example, it is possible to set up A/B tests to compare two variants of an emailing campaign, a landing page or any other marketing action.
Benefits of a data-driven marketing strategy
It helps improve your customer knowledge
Data is a real gold mine that enables you to learn a lot about your customers and prospects in terms of socio-demographic information, interests, preferences, obstacles and motivations, etc. This comprehensive view gives you a complete understanding of your customers and allows you to offer them products and services that are suited to their expectations.
It is also possible to utilize more advanced features of data marketing, such as predictive analytics, to predict customer needs. This allows you to devise innovative proposals and distinguish yourself from your competitors with a unique value proposition in your market.
However, to truly improve your customer knowledge, you must collect the most relevant data, then clean and centralize it to get a general overview of your data. But don’t forget that you must constantly enrich your data with new information.
You must improve the customer experience
It is not easy to maintain a long-lasting relationship with your customers. As consumers are inundated with promotional offers (especially on the Internet), you must create fully targeted marketing campaigns. In other words, you need to send the right message, to the right person, through the right channel. This shows that you really know your customers and that you take their needs and preferences into account.
Beyond marketing messages, data can also be used to shape a seamless and fully personalized customer journey. In this regard, data can help you to be present at the right place, at the right time, according to the habits of each consumer: website, social media, search engines, etc. An in-depth analysis of your data may therefore allow you to offer a better customer experience.
And a good customer experience means loyalty. If you have an in-depth understanding of your buyers, you can implement effective actions to encourage them to come back to you, but also to reward the most loyal customers. Likewise, by regularly analyzing your marketing efforts, you can optimize future campaigns: a virtuous circle that allows you to continuously improve your marketing performance.
You must personalize your marketing campaigns
The era of mass marketing has come to an end: it is now time to personalize your content and proposals. This approach benefits both your company and your customers.
In fact, personalized marketing campaigns are much better received by consumers and have a greater impact. This translates into a better conversion rate (and therefore, higher turnover and profits) for the organization, and a significant boost to the company’s brand image.
This is what a data-driven marketing strategy is all about, allowing you to analyze and anticipate your customers’ behaviour with a view to sending them the most relevant messages, on their favourite channels, and as frequently as they wish. As the buying process is becoming increasingly complex, this personalization-based approach delivers unparalleled results in engagement, purchasing, and conversion. Data is also very useful in devising innovative and appealing campaigns, always based on customer knowledge.
You must boost your business performance
Customer knowledge is a precious resource, so it would be a shame not to share it with the company’s other lines of business. Data is therefore an excellent way to reconcile marketing and sales management, meaning that the latter must fully understand its customers, their journey, and their needs to fulfil its role.
Data marketing provides a comprehensive overview of the customer base, greatly benefiting the sales team. You must also know which products a customer has already purchased, their frequency of purchase and their preferred channels to successfully perform the sales function.
In addition, you can enhance your analysis of the company’s sales activity through marketing data. This data allows you to measure the potential of your various prospects, then to classify them according to their interests, needs and preferences, which will increase your sales performance in the long term and generate more sales.
By fully harnessing the customer data at your disposal, your company can considerably strengthen its marketing efforts, proposing more personalized, more targeted and more effective campaigns. But to implement a data-driven marketing strategy you must carry out an in-depth transformation of your organization, which must adopt a resolutely ‘customer-centered’ approach. The success of such a strategy also depends on the deployment of an adapted Business Intelligence solution.
