You’ve probably been told that data-driven marketing is integral to your overall digital strategy, but that it’s hard to implement and even harder to measure success. If this sounds familiar, then you’re definitely in the right place.
Differentiation is the key to success in marketing. And if you want to differentiate your brand and stand out from the crowd, then data-driven marketing is for you. In this guide, we’ll show you how to use this strategy to help you understand your customers better than anyone else—and use that understanding to create strategies that will grow your company faster than anything else on the market today.
We’ll start by explaining exactly “data-driven marketing” and why it’s so important for companies today. We shall also learn how most companies can use their data effectively and some advanced strategies for using data-powered insights to achieve maximum results from every campaign.
In particular, we’ll look at some of the more advanced uses of data in marketing programs:
Predictive analytics (predicting which customers are likely to buy something based on their past behavior)
Customer segmentation (grouping customers into buckets based on their similarities)
A/B testing (testing two different versions of an ad or piece of content to see which one performs better).
What is data-driven marketing?
The term “data-driven marketing” refers to the use of statistical analysis and other quantitative methods to improve marketing decisions. It is a subset of marketing analytics, which is the process of collecting and analyzing data to make informed business decisions.
The purpose of data-driven strategy is to eliminate guesswork from your brand marketing efforts by basing them on hard data. It can help you identify growth opportunities, understand your customers’ needs and how they interact with your brand, and measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. You can use these results to improve your customer experience, better your product or service, and ultimately increase revenue.
Data-driven decision-making is essentially the same as any other type of marketing that relies on data. But it differs from traditional techniques because it uses more advanced methods to collect, analyze and apply information about customers and prospects. It also uses tools like predictive analytics that allow marketers to predict future behavior based on current trends.
Marketers use their knowledge of data analysis to make data-informed decisions rather than relying on intuition or instinct alone. They can determine which strategies work best for which groups of people by analyzing large amounts of information from multiple data sources.
It is also important to note that data-driven marketing isn’t just about having a lot of data to play with; it’s also about ensuring that the right data is being used at the right time. Using data judiciously is essential; otherwise, it could become misleading rather than beneficial.
Examples
Data-driven marketing is key to any business and should be incorporated into the plans of startups and well-established companies alike. The following examples demonstrate how this can help your business grow:
Personalized email campaigns
Personalized email campaigns are one of the most effective ways to get your marketing messages out. It’s one of the keys to a successful marketing campaign.
By understanding your customers and what motivates them, you can craft personalized messaging that resonates with them at every stage of the buying process.
Data can be collected from social media channels, registration/sign-in data, and cookies added to the website.
This approach helps you build a strong relationship with your customers and increase their chances of purchasing from you.
A personalized email campaign can be used for everything from sending a thank-you note after someone visits your website to prompting them to book an appointment with one of your sales associates.
PS: learn more about personalized strategies in marketing here.
Targeted advertising
This is another popular way to use personal data. This approach involves collecting information about your customers and then showing them ads on social media or other websites related to their interests.
For example, if someone visits your website, you can load their IP address into a database and show them a Facebook ad that features an item they viewed on your site.
The aim is to get potential customers back on your site, so they’ll convert into paying customers—an excellent way to build brand awareness and increase sales.
The only downside is that this method can be very expensive. It also takes time to build up your database, so it’s best suited to already established businesses with a large customer base.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that allows your business to reach new customers on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. The aim is to build a community around your brand, attract new customers, and generate sales by reaching out to people who are interested in your products or services. It’s an affordable way for businesses to market themselves without spending tons of money on traditional ad campaigns.
The key to social media marketing is finding the right audience and sharing content they want to engage with.
This can be achieved by collecting and analyzing the data of your potential customers. This will allow you to create better content that will most likely engage customers. You can also use this information to target specific groups of people based on different demographics.
Social media changes frequently, so staying up-to-date on the latest trends is essential to keep your content fresh and relevant.
How does it work?
Data-driven marketing can be used in various ways to improve your business’s bottom line.
This is how it works:
Collects information about your customers, products, and services to understand who they are and what they want from you as a company. This is also known as market research or market intelligence gathering.
Analyze the information against trends in your industry to enable you to see where there may be opportunities for growth, including new products or services targeted toward particular demographics.
Uses this information to create a detailed marketing plan that aligns with your business goals.
Why is it important?
Understanding your audience: Data-driven strategy for marketing helps you thoroughly understand who your target customers are to tailor messaging to meet their needs.
Making better decisions: When deciding which tactics will work best for getting results from your campaigns and initiatives, data is crucial for choosing the content types that will resonate most with users.
Increasing efficiency: By using data to guide your marketing campaign and measure its effectiveness, you can save time and money by focusing on the best tactics for your business.
Limitations
It’s important to remember that data-driven marketing is not a cure-all. Data-driven marketing alone won’t make your business successful, and it should never be used as an excuse to cut corners. Here are some limitations of this type of marketing:
It is a process that must be constantly refined and updated. Getting caught up in measuring the wrong metrics or focusing too heavily on vanity metrics is easy.
It can’t fix a bad product or service. If your product concept is faulty, no amount of A/B testing will save it—and if the quality of what you’re offering isn’t up to par, then even the most sophisticated campaign won’t do much good at improving lifetime value (LTV).
Even though data helps us understand our customers better than ever before, there are many things we still don’t know about them—like their innermost desires and motivations—which means that marketers should always keep an open mind when interacting with them via any channel.
Marketing Based on Data Best Practices
Before getting into your data-driven marketing campaign, it’s important to understand its best practices and what you should do to make the most of your marketing strategy.
Understand the customer
Data helps you get a better understanding of your consumer. If you don’t understand what they want and how they behave, creating campaigns that resonate with them is impossible. So always keep an eye on the latest market research reports, surveys, and customer feedback from multiple channels.
Surveys and polls are great for getting a snapshot of what customers think about your brand. Still, looking at purchasing behavior and social listening data is important to gain a more accurate picture. The more you know about your customers, the better equipped you’ll be to create campaigns that resonate with them.
Define your goals
Before you can create a data-driven marketing strategy, you need to know what your goals are. Are you trying to increase brand awareness or drive sales? Do you want people to take a specific action (like signing up for an email list or sharing a link on social media)? Once you’ve determined your objectives, it’s easier to measure them and make changes as necessary.
Defining your goals is crucial because it helps you avoid creating strategies that don’t help you achieve them. It also makes it easier to focus on the right customer data, so you can better understand how customer interactions happen with your brand.
Set a budget
For most businesses, this is a new field with many unknowns. To help you get started, set aside a budget that allows you to experiment with different tactics until you find the ones that work best for your business. You might also want to account for this expense in your monthly marketing spend.
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is not setting a budget. If you don’t know how much money you can spend on a campaign, it’s difficult to know when it’s time to scale up or down.
Identify your target audience
Once you’ve set your budget, the next step is identifying your target audience. This is one of the most critical steps in marketing your business, and it’s also one of the most difficult.
The key here is to consider your ideal customer and how you can reach them. If you offer a service or product that caters to a specific niche, it won’t be as hard because you should already know who they are. If not, start by thinking about the type of person who would benefit from your offerings. Then narrow down their demographic data based on age, gender, income level, and interests.
Choose the right marketing channels to use for each campaign
After you’ve identified your target audience, your next move is to choose the right marketing channels for each campaign. Each channel has its own audience and behavioral patterns.
For example, Facebook is a good choice for businesses that sell products or services to women aged 35-50 in the UK because it’s one of the most popular social networks for this demographic. On the other hand, LinkedIn is more effective if your target audience is business professionals who use LinkedIn as their primary professional network.
Use data to form your decisions and evaluate the results of campaigns
The more information you collect, the better. Gathering and analyzing data is crucial to making good decisions; examining how your campaigns performed can help identify areas for improvement.
If you’re just starting out, consider using Google Analytics to track your website traffic and conversions. You can use this information to identify what content is performing well and which channels drive traffic the most. This data will help you identify potential new audiences for future marketing campaigns.
How to use this kind of marketing for your eCommerce
Identify your target audience.
Accessing the data generated by your eCommerce store will help you identify who is visiting and making purchases and who is dropping out of the sales funnel.
When launching your marketing activities, you may have a specific market or group, and having this information at your fingertips allows greater flexibility in determining how products are marketed and promoted.
Here are some of the analytics and data you’ll want to analyze:
1) Gender
2) Age
3) Geographical location
4) Spending habits
5) Browsing history
6) Amount spent
7) Traffic source/channel
Using these data sets, you can construct a clearer picture of your audience persona and how they engage with the products in your store. Thus, you may find niches and optimize content for them more effectively.
It would be beneficial to consider every facet of your audience’s demographic data, behavior, purchasing preferences, etc.
Your audience will likely be divided into multiple subgroups, and data-driven strategies will help to target each segment appropriately.
If your target audience consists of consumers who have already purchased from you, it will help to create a customized marketing effort for them to promote brand loyalty.
You can email your customers in segments, tailoring offers to fit each group’s needs. For example: Send discounts and promotions only to price-sensitive buyers.
It’s also possible to customize the content of your paid advertising or any other type of ad you might use. “One size fits all” is not a good strategy, so take advantage of the data (and possibilities) at hand.
Rather than relying on assumptions or stereotypes, looking at customer data is important. This way, you can tailor your marketing efforts to the people who will most likely respond. This is a better strategy than guessing what people want or assuming that one ad will work for everyone.
Use strategies to boost your SEO
A study from 2018 stated, “Of all traffic to e-commerce websites, 42.18 percent comes from search engines, and 40.1 percent comes directly from users—which makes search engines the largest channel for driving e-commerce website traffic.”
Without a strong SEO strategy, your e-commerce site may fail to attract customers and generate sales.
To get more targeted traffic from search, your best bet is to use tactics that make it easier for users to find you.
By formulating a data-driven approach and employing smart keyword strategies, you can identify terms and phrases that are highly relevant to your brand or products.
Analytics tools come a long way in helping you to see where most of your traffic and conversions come from.
The data collected can help you understand user behavior, which will help you make actionable decisions. A good SEO strategy should include a holistic approach that covers off-site factors like link building and on-site factors such as page speed and mobile optimization.
It is important to note that SEO is not a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing process, and you need to keep up with it. With the growing number of websites on the internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to find what they want. As such, brands need to stay ahead of the curve and invest in an effective SEO strategy to help them remain relevant and competitive.
Augment your content marketing
Content marketing is the most effective way to reach your audience and increase brand awareness. Creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content can attract more visitors to your website and turn them into customers. However, it’s important to note that not all types of content are created equal. In fact, some types of content perform better than others, depending on the goal you want to achieve through your marketing efforts.
Analyze the analytics for your website content; how many shares are there, what kind of comments are being generated, and how much time people spend reading it before moving on.
Analytics will help you determine which aspects of your content are most effective—and where improvements could be made.
One of the many tasks that face eCommerce store owners is writing content for products, blog posts, guest postings, and social media. And all that stuff has to be high quality.
If you’re not sure where to start, there are plenty of resources available that can help.
For example, HubSpot has a blog with loads of valuable tips for writing content for SEO purposes.
You can also use WordStream’s Content Optimization Tool to check the quality of your content and find ways to make it more appealing.
Focusing on the right channels
When it comes to marketing, the internet is a big place. It’s important to focus on the proper channels, so you can find success with your efforts.
Analytics can show you where your customers and leads are coming from and which sources of traffic people use most often.
You can use this information to focus on the proper channels for your business. For instance, if you see that Google is sending most of your traffic, it will be worth focusing your efforts there. On the other hand, if Facebook is doing most of the heavy lifting, then you should focus on growing that audience and targeting them with ads.
Marketing is a numbers game. You need to get as many people as possible to see your content and hopefully take action on it. You can’t do that without a solid strategy for attracting traffic and converting those visitors into leads or customers.
So by focusing on the right channels, you can increase traffic and conversions while also saving time and money by only spending on the most efficient marketing methods.
The best tools for eCommerce
Data is a powerful tool, but it can be challenging to manage. There are many different tools out there that help you collect and analyze data for your eCommerce store, but here are some of the best tools you can come across:
Google Analytics
The most popular and comprehensive tool for measuring website traffic, Google Analytics is a great way to understand what your customers are looking for.
From the number of visitors on your site to where they’re coming from and how long they stay, Google Analytics has everything you need to make the most out of your eCommerce business. It also allows you to track conversion rates, which are crucial when optimizing your website for sales.
You can also use Google Analytics to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Google Analytics is an essential tool for any website owner. It’s free and the best tool to help you make decisions based on data that will improve your business.
KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics is another tool that was specifically designed for eCommerce websites.
Kissmetrics focuses on understanding individual customer behavior rather than simply reporting aggregate traffic information.
It allows you to track your visitors’ behavior and optimize their experience on your site.
KISSmetrics also offers a variety of features that allow you to track and optimize your website’s performance.
It provides you with the ability to see how users are interacting with specific pages on your site.
Another useful feature of KISSmetrics is that it allows you to create funnels that show how people move through the different phases of the customer journey. This way, you can see where they drop off and make changes accordingly to boost sales.
The tool also provides detailed analytics that allows you to see exactly what is happening on your site at any given moment.
Adobe Marketing Cloud
Adobe Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive suite of tools that allows you to create, publish and measure your content across multiple channels. It includes analytics, data management tools, and marketing automation software that helps businesses drive revenue from every customer interaction.
Adobe Marketing Cloud also allows you to create custom dashboards for specific departments such as sales or marketing to easily access the information they need to make decisions about their campaigns.
Adobe is a powerful tool that established eCommerce stores can use. The platform’s analytics engine, the Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC), helps companies track real-time campaigns and target customers better with personalized email content.
In addition to these tools, Adobe also offers a variety of services. These include analytics, digital marketing consulting, and training. You can also use their Digital Marketing Hub as a one-stop shop for everything you need to grow your business.
Hotjar
It would be impossible to compile a list of the best website analytics tools without including Hotjar, which essentially provides a bird’s-eye view of what your visitors see on-site.
Hotjar is a tool that allows you to gather feedback from your website visitors and identify the areas of your site that need improvement.
You can use it to create heatmaps for your website, get visitor recordings and find out how people use your site.
Hotjar has a user experience testing feature that allows you to conduct A/B tests on specific elements of your website. You can see which buttons users click most often on your page or collect email addresses through popups. The tool offers an analytics dashboard where you can view data from all of these features together.
Hotjar also has a feature called “Surveys and Feedback,” which allows you to send out surveys and get feedback from your website visitors. You can use this tool for market research or user interviews.
The tool is straightforward to use and has a clean user interface. You can also learn from the many guides available on its website.
Klaviyo
Email marketing and e-commerce are two peas in a pod.
Klaviyo is an email automation and analytics platform that’s tailored for eCommerce merchants: it offers a wide variety of message templates plus high frequency, so campaigns can be executed effectively.
It has a built-in CRM that allows you to store all customer information, including emails and social media accounts. Klaviyo also has an email builder that helps you create personalized emails.
It also offers advanced analytics and reporting helping you better understand your customer.
Klaviyo is one of the most popular email marketing platforms used by eCommerce businesses because it’s easy to use and offers many features tailored specifically for merchants.
It also has integrations with many other popular tools, including Bigcommerce and Shopify.
Conclusion
Marketing is one of the most critical aspects of your business, and it’s essential to keep up with all the latest trends. With data-driven marketing, you can make sure you’re spending your time and money on effective strategies that will pay off in significant ways for your company.
By tracking the data from all of your campaigns, you’ll be able to see what works best for your audience and how they react to different types of content.
This will allow you to craft a strategy, personalized experiences specifically to your audience and their needs.
The key is ensuring you have the right tools to measure everything as accurately as possible—especially when it comes down to ROI. Having the right tools in place will help you be more efficient and effective.