Using Data-Driven Marketing for Business Success

Posted: 12 Oct 2016 06:00 AM PDT

With the advent of huge amounts of data now available, thanks to online interactions and shopping, digital marketing has become hugely reliant on this data-type of information for decision-making. The data has many sources like a company’s CRM or ERP system or its website and social media presence.

Data-driven marketing is now the framework that is guiding the development of more targeted campaigns, that are linked to what a company has learned about its customer base and audience, in the hopes that more leads and deals will be achieved. This data-driven marketing is also telling CMOs about how to build better customer relationships and enhance the service experience level.

By all accounts, using this information appears to be working quite well as long as marketers understand how to separate the data and pull out the data that can provide them with the deepest insights. However, maybe you are not yet quite sure how to use this customer data to acquire and retain more customers.

Here are some tips on how to use data-driven marketing for business success:

Start with how to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts. Make sure the right type of data is available for use including data from channels like mobile, social media, email, web, SMS and print, and is comparable across those channels (such as using custom links, landing pages, etc). Having this consistency will provide a clear picture of patterns or insights in the data rather than trying to find answers in data that has been collected for different reasons. When we started our invoicing company we saw that there were patterns but didn't correlate them to data. Now we've matured and we correlate our data and study it. Had we not been tracking and more importantly paying attention, we wouldn't have seen ROI coming from conferences, something we spend a lot of time marketing.

Determine the campaign’s objective as part of a full evaluation plan. In order to truly get results from this data, you need to create campaigns around a specific objective. Do you want to raise brand awareness, retain more customers, or increase revenue? Each one of these goals has needs for different data to shape the campaign and check the campaign’s success once it has finished. Each campaign objective also has a different ROI timeframe, so be sure to accommodate that in the measurements you are using with the data from each campaign.

Run pilot campaigns to better understand how data-driven marketing works for that marketing objective. Running these pilot campaigns gives you a good test run at what it’s like to take this marketing approach before making a larger investment. It’s a good way to practice and tweak what you are doing before actually breaking into the budget. You can use the time to really study all the potential insights there might be and put these learnings to work for the actual rollout of the larger marketing campaign.

Continually assess what you are doing with data-driven marketing to determine where improvements can be made. One of the best things about data-driven marketing is it’s constantly giving you a performance appraisal on what’s working and what needs to change. This means you will see if a channel, message, or call-to-action should be altered. The changes can then be justified because the data is the proof in the pudding.

Increase investment once you have the right formula. Once you know your formula is working, then you want to invest more into the campaign to expand it for greater results and a higher rate of ROI over the life of the campaigns associated with this marketing mix. This also can tell you it may be worth it to try other platforms so you can start deploying marketing campaigns for a wider reach.

Ensure the departments work together to maximize the success of data-driven marketing. No matter how beneficial data-driven marketing is you won’t really tap into its potential until you get all aspects of your company to work together, bringing in data from marketing, customer service, financial systems, CRM and more. Having the ability to create a single view that is developed between the departments can further drive the benefits from data-driven marketing because succinct strategic decisions can be made on the type of customer to go after. With all departments working together, there will be a consistency such that the customer experiences pay off in even bigger dividends. This can be done by having an organization-wide data strategy in place so the data can be shared across the departments, by reorganizing functions and units to make collaboration easier, and by creating a cross-functional team to further support collaboration.

With a consistent and collaborative approach to what you are implementing with data-driven marketing, you will gain a better understanding of what your audience and customers think, want, and do in relation to the various ways you are communicating with them across platforms. In turn, this will improve your campaigns and help you get closer to succeeding at every marketing tactic you are implementing and achieve a greater ROI in the process.

With the benefits of data-driven marketing at the forefront of your mind, don't forget you'll have to introduce it into your data management strategy. There is help. Download the ebook Maximize Your Marketing today.