Using data-driven marketing is the best way that a company can use information that it collects to get better returns on marketing efforts. But do you fully understand the term data-driven marketing and more importantly, do you know how to use it effectively? In this article, we are going to delve deep into data-driven marketing and find out just exactly how this process works.
What Is Data-Driven Marketing?
Data-driven marketing is basically marketing that is based on data that you have collected. This may seem obvious but it is a little more complicated than that. Because there is so much data available in the world today, and so much data about consumers that companies could collect, it is mostly about the analysis of that data.
For example, you could track hundreds of things about your customers but without any analysis or strategy in place for how you are going to use the data, it is going to give you very little information that you can use in a marketing campaign.
Data-Driven Marketing Tools
There are number of tools and that companies can use to collect and analyze data that they can use for marketing purposes. One of the most effective ones is actually by asking customers directly. Online consumer panels, survey sites and various other online focus groups are easy to set up, cost very little money and can give companies a great deal of information.
In addition companies can use things like conjoint analysis. Conjoint analysis is a series of hypothetical questionnaires where customers are asked their opinion about potential products or services. Analytics is often used in order to collect customer data. Of course, you have to do statistical analysis after you have collected the data in order to put it into a form that you can use.
Making Decisions Based On Data Should Be Essential
When it comes to the internet, there is no excuse for not using data to make decisions. Not only has research shown over and over again that using data to make marketing or advertising decisions result in a much stronger campaign, data collection happens all the time on the internet anyway. You may as well leverage this data collection, I'll get the information that you need from your consumers and adjust your products, services or marketing strategies to appeal best to those customers. Your company should be looking at the data several times a month as it can change quickly.
Ways That You Can Use Data-Driven Marketing
There are a lot of strategies for using data-driven marketing to improve your business. Here are a few of those so that you can better understand how data-driven marketing works.
Ensure that your landing pages are working by creating several different landing pages that is targeted towards different customer groups. In today's world, where customers expect to have a somewhat personal experience when they get to a website, having a landing page that is intended for everyone that visits is a terrible idea. This goes beyond just changing the language for the person that is visiting the page. Use actual analytics data to give you an idea of who is visiting and then directing them to the appropriate landing page that is customized just for them.
You should also set up buyer personas so that you know what kind of customers you have. Buyer personas are simply representative profiles of typical customers. Usually, businesses will have between five and ten customer profiles, but there could be more. These may not represent every one of your customers, but they should represent the majority of them.
You should also use custom audiences to target your advertising to the right customers. Facebook custom audiences is the most well-known of the targeted ads program, but Google, Bing and LinkedIn are some other examples of sites that allow you to create custom audiences for your advertising.
You can also use data-driven marketing to give customers a deal. Papa John's pizza chain is a good example of this. They are always sending out emails to those who are signed up giving them some type of deal that they can use. As a result, they get a much higher rate of return for their email marketing then pizza companies or any restaurants that do not send out deals but instead just send out promotional messages. Customers do not want to lose out on a deal, so they will take advantage of it even when they didn't plan to have pizza that day.
Find the best time to make social media posts, particularly the most important ones. Most businesses think of social media as a 24-hour a day, 7-days a week communications channel. To a certain extent while this is true to a certain extent the fact is that there are better times than others to post on social media. You want your social media post to be seen and that means that you need to find times to post when customers are going to be looking at their social media feed and you want to strap strategize your timing so that your post do not get buried by all of the other people that they are following.
Use online behavior triggers. If you can gather data about what a customer is doing and what their current frame of mind is and then show them an advertisement or send them an email that lets them know that you have whatever solution they are looking for at that particular time, you are going to increase your Effectiveness a great deal. For example, if you are looking at your analytics and you see that people are visiting your site looking for a specific type of product, but they bounce off immediately when they see that they have you do not sell that particular product, sending an email campaign or displaying an advertisement offering an alternative to that product by name is going to be very effective and get people's attention.
