A data-driven marketing strategy often requires a different mindset. Data-driven marketers need to be focused on better understanding customer requirements, and possess a level of innovation required to select and make use of the best data management tools available to use today. A data-driven marketing strategy needs a data-driven mindset, and for that reason, it is difficult to implement with a mindset that might have been relevant in the past. A good data-driven marketing strategy will utilize customer data, technology, and data analysis in order to find new leads, maintain existing customer databases, and drive revenue by attracting new customers and maximizing conversions.
When Should a Marketing Strategy Begin?
It’s a common misconception to believe that the marketing process begins only after a product has been developed, but this should never be the case with a data-driven marketing strategy. In fact, the preliminary process begins long before the product or service itself is developed, by identifying a gap in the market that needs to be filled with a service or product in order to meet a need or solve a problem. Typically, these needs are identified through a range of data-gathering methods, including social media discussions, customer surveys, or data collected in universities and research institutions.
On the other hand, for companies who have already developed their products and services, the majority of future developments can be based on any data that the company receives from tracking competitor performance, customer interactions, and secondary data. Today we are certainly living in the era of Big Data and any company that does not gather, retrieve, analyze, store and understand customer interactions and other key forms of customer data is likely to get left behind.
So, what can your business do to better succeed with data-driven marketing?
Invest in a Good Customer Relationship Management System
Today’s business operations are increasingly complex, so it makes sense to invest in a good CRM system. This system can help you better manage the complexity of operations such as taxation, sales, inventory, and the movement and tracking of goods to name a few. A good CRM system enables your business to track the movements of a customer right from the moment that they place a sales order to the moment an invoice is generated or payment is received and the product is shipped.
Today, your CRM system will also provide the option to store important data on each customer including contact details, names, ages, special dates, repeat purchases, loyalty status, and more. Utilizing a CRM system can be one of the best places to start when it comes to gathering data on your customers that can later be used in a data-driven marketing campaign. It enables you to get a better understanding of your customers in terms of their buying patterns, lifestyles, behaviors, and preferences. Future products and services can then be developed with your valued customers in mind.
Make Use of a Reputable Database Management Platform
With a good CRM system in mind, it’s true that your company might find itself inundated with a lot of data on a daily basis. This could include both structured and unstructured data, which may not always make sense to the marketers. Often, data will not make a lot of sense unless it is structured into different categories and classifications. Doing this manually can be a huge amount of work for a person to undertake, so it’s a wise idea to invest in a good database management platform that is able to work continuously behind the scenes. A good DMP should be able to fetch data from a range of different sources, identify the different segments, and provide media planners with directions for where to position and utilize the data in a marketing strategy.
Use the Best Data Management and Analysis Tools
When it comes to tracking and analyzing data, this process has become so important today that there is certainly no shortage of great tools on the market. You can find a wide range of tools to choose from if you want to track and analyze data from your competition, mobile apps, your website, social media, emails, and much more. Because of this, it’s no surprise that choosing the right one for your business can often be a massive undertaking.
Before choosing the right data tracking and management tools for you, it’s important to spend some time researching the options, understanding what you need from the product, and setting your ideal budget. Most marketers will need to opt for a tool that includes integrated marketed management in order to ensure that they can achieve the best results from a data-driven marketing strategy. This involves an assessment of customer interactions, data, and ongoing innovations in real-time.
Prioritize Customer Experience
While an increased market share might be the overall goal of any marketing strategy, consumers should always be the top priority. The existing consumers, in particular, should always be at the front and center of any marketing strategy, and prioritizing the existing customer experience will help everything else fall into place in terms of your other business goals. Existing consumers should be rewarded and valued for past purchases and their loyalty towards the company, and any data collected about existing customers should be prioritized towards ensuring that future business decisions are made with them in mind, whether it’s the process of offering a new product or service or coming up with a new special offer or deal.
Define Your Goals and Objectives
While companies might be using a similar set of tools and strategies to gather, store, and analyze consumer data, it’s important to understand that the targets, goals, and objectives differ. In some cases, the goals might be centered around driving more sales, improving branding, launching a new brand, product, or service, increasing customer purchases or subscriptions, and more. As a marketer, it’s important to understand your key goals and objectives in order to be able to put the data that you collect and analyze to better use and reach the best outcomes for the business and its customers. A good data management platform will ensure that you don’t just gather data, but also come up with actionable insights that lead to trustworthy, credible marketing decisions for the future.
Keep on Top of the Curve
A data-driven marketing strategy can’t be achieved successfully with an old-fashioned marketing mindset. In order to most effectively use data to drive your business’s marketing, you may be required to make some significant changes to processes, such as your overall marketing operations and how you interact with your customers. It’s important to consider the future of data-driven marketing and work together with your team to stay on top of the curve and at the cutting edge of new technologies and solutions designed to help you put together a better marketing strategy with data at the forefront. Click here to learn about the importance of data analytics in modern marketing and the directions that it is expected to take in the future.
Get the Right IT Team
Big data is the result of a combined effort of marketing, advertising, and technology. Technological skills are essential for the process of capturing, storing, and structuring data in order to present it in a way that can easily be understood in order to base decisions on the data. Because of this, marketing teams often rely heavily on IT professionals to make sense of and structure raw data. It is important to hire the right IT professionals with a keen understanding of big data for your company, since these are the people that you are going to be working closely alongside to make sense of the data that you gather in order to present it in a way that makes a data-driven marketing strategy possible.
Learn from Your Competition
Keeping track of what your competitors are doing is important for data-driven marketers as these allow you to learn more about and adopt industry best practices rather than developing and taking a chance on new strategies that have not yet been proven in the market. By gathering and analyzing data about your main competitors, you can learn more about the strategies that they implement in order to give them an edge in the industry and develop your own future marketing strategies with these best practices in mind.
Adopt Data-Driven Strategies Early
Last but not least, don’t get left behind in a world of big data. While it has been consistently proven that using data leads to better business and marketing decisions, many businesses are uncomfortable with adopting new technologies until they become mainstream, which often leads to missing out on a variety of key advantages such as increasing revenue and building better relationships with customers. In order to put the benefits of using data in your marketing to work for your business as soon as possible, early adoption is crucial.
Today, data is more important than ever for companies who want to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and use this knowledge to make more informed marketing decisions with a higher chance of success.
FAQ
When should a marketing plan start?
It’s a common misconception to believe that the marketing process begins only after a product has been developed, but this should never be the case with a data-driven marketing strategy. In fact, the preliminary process begins long before the product or service itself is developed, by identifying a gap in the market that needs to be filled with a service or product in order to meet a need or solve a problem. Typically, these needs are identified through a range of data-gathering methods, including social media discussions, customer surveys, or data collected in universities and research institutions.
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