Importance of Data Driven Marketing

What is Data Driven Marketing?

Data driven marketing strategy is a game-changer. It opens up newer opportunities for letting you save money, save time, or boost your marketing results. Effective use of data can aid in decision-making, help optimizing processes and leveraging your resources to their maximum. Right from data for market research, competition mapping, marketing to retail, advertising to brand audits–the list is endless. A study of global companies conducted by TCS suggests that 80% of companies have improved their decision making as a result of utilizing big data.

But does that mean you should also be using data for every business decision? Our answer to that might seem obvious by now, but how to get started? Using data driven marketing strategies is probably your best bet, as the expected returns can be highest. 

To incorporate data effectively into your company’s marketing strategy, it’s important to understand that data in marketing essentially implies that the disciplines of management, marketing and IT need to be aligned with one another. This requires a strong organizational will, and top-down directives won’t be of much help.

Strategic data driven marketing enables companies to engage their users through multiple channels, and offer targeted and personalized messages. The result? Better brand recall and enhanced brand perception.This in turn resulting in improved sales figures. Data-driven marketing can also aid in achieving superior customer experience and support through real-time responses; even for occasionally wowing your customers by predicting what they might be looking for.

Digital data provides useful insights into the customers’ buying journey. Starting from generation of interest to evaluation of alternatives, selection, and the final purchase; there are data points everywhere. This knowledge can help marketers in ironing out any hiccups on the way to a customer’s purchase decision. It also tells them when the customer is most vulnerable to be influenced. Translate this into, how to incite them into purchasing the right offer, deliver via which communication channel. Here’s how to make the right use of data for marketing.

1. Break Data Silos 

To start, dig up and aggregate every tiny bit of information that you have on your customers. Information collected through various touchpoints in the form of POS records, purchase history, in-store buying behaviour, support requests, website logs, mail reports, feedback forms – anything and everything.

It’s important to combine online with offline for a more holistic picture. Thus, the data will usually come from different departments which makes it all the more important to collaborate for breaking any ‘data silos’ that may exist. The end goal — gaining a crystal-clear perspective on who your customers are so that you can answer the question — what are they looking for.

2. Leverage the Data

Once you have the right amount of information on who your customers are and what they want time to dig in much deeper to discover the hidden, non-obvious insights–aka the ‘areas of improvement’. Data visualization can help to do precisely that. Once you’ve got these areas of improvement figured out and taken care of, move towards making your data actionable.

3. Make Data Actionable

There’s no point in having a lot of data, but still being clueless as to how you can turn it into revenues. Data in real-time is the answer. What if you could send a mail to a shopper who just abandoned their cart, making her an irresistible offer? Imagine doing that for every visitor who couldn’t finish the purchase process!

You know who your customers are and what interests them, and you’ve now made them an offer they just can’t refuse;  that too through a channel that they’re most receptive to. How much additional revenue could that bring in?

Actionable data shouldn’t be restricted only to marketing. Share the insights with other key functions like sales, product, customer service for overall positive customer experience.

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