Why Your Marketing Needs to be Data-Driven

In this day and age, there’s no excuse for not knowing what your customers want. There are now a wide variety of tools that enable marketers to capture a range of data at particular stages in their marketing campaigns. Gone are the days of mass, untargeted broadcasting. The digital age has brought about widened reach, but pinpoint targeting accuracy.

Adweek created an infographic that clearly shows us how marketing evolved through time. In the 1960s, marketing was mostly used at a mass targeting level through direct mail and advertising. 20 years later, direct marketing was used along with computer processing to target specific segments of the population through direct mail and telemarketing. In 1995, email marketing began and flourished, and when Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, users became even more tightly connected to their mobile devices.

Fast forward to 2019, users are highly mobile and yet utterly dependent on their handheld gadgets to stay connected. Marketing today is driven by data-backed research and customer information that can be captured at every stage in the buying process. We don’t need to guess what people want; we just need to know where to look.

Marketing needs to be data-driven to be effective. If you know your target user’s behavior, goals, pain points, and challenges, you can develop marketing campaigns that cater to their specific needs. Data such as a user’s browsing patterns, social media activity, online purchase behavior, and other metrics can help you focus your marketing efforts on what works. So, collect as much information about your target market as much as you can. This data will be at the core of any successful marketing strategy.

Truly? Yes, truly. Let’s face it, most leaders of Marketing organizations – and many other types of organizations for that matter – talk a good game about the importance of being data-driven. It’s a good sound bite, in large part, because it’s both rooted in common sense and it embodies the modern in “modern marketing.”

But actually being data-driven is a very different thing. A fraction of organizations really nail it when it comes to having data be at the forefront of even most decisions. What are the keys to making the data-driven sound bite ring true? Here are a few…

According to The Global Review of Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising, a paper by MediaMath, MediaMath, The Winterberry Group, and the Global DMA, 53% of marketers claim that there is a high demand for customer-centric communications. Big data and innovative analytics tools enable marketers to create highly targeted campaigns with personalized communications.

With carefully analyzed data to back their marketing strategies, marketers have a much better idea of what and when to send marketing messages. This timeliness and accuracy increases the chance of striking an emotional chord with the audience and encouraging positive engagement.

Customers want information that’s useful to them. Through data-driven marketing, campaigns are targeted towards a specific need. The Global Review… study also found that 49% of brands use data-driven marketing to enhance the customer experience by conducting satisfaction surveys and identifying areas for improvement.

Customer value analytics allow marketers to speed up the sales cycle without compromising on personalized service. Instead of undermining customer relationships, big data provides an omnichannel service that helps enhance the customer experience by making it consistent. Whether you contacted them via social media, over the phone, or through face to face interactions, customers receive the same pieces of information and undergo the same experiences.

Leads generated through Facebook respond differently to leads generated from the Google Display Network (GDN).