Data has become the cornerstone of modern B2B marketing.
Around 40% of brands opt for data driven marketing strategies, and 88% of marketers use data obtained from third-party channels to enhance their understanding of the audience. It comes with the power to make your marketing tactics accurate and productive.
With a data-backed approach, marketers take assumptions out of the picture and make evidence-based projections. These help them understand customers, foresee their concerns, and improve their experience strategically. Once they have the necessary information, they can enhance marketing and business outcomes.
But what does data driven marketing entail?
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What is Data Driven Marketing? Benefits of Data Driven Marketing
Data driven marketing is an approach to building strategies for brand communication based on big data analysis. This analysis provides detailed insights into the business’s ideal market segment, audience base, specific consumer needs, behavior, and preferences. With that information, companies improve brand perception and customer experience.
Marketers who use data driven strategies significantly expand the likelihood that their prospective customers will take the desired action. This includes making a purchase, registering for a webinar, clicking on a specific advertisement, etc.
Data driven strategies also pave the way for highly targeted engagement and better conversion rates for the highest possible return on investment (ROI).
To elaborate, some of the positives of implementing data driven marketing strategies for your business are as follows:
1. Reach the Right Audience Segment
Determining your ideal audience segment is immensely important to drive traffic toward your brand and expanding engagement. With data driven marketing, your first step is to collect data on the ideal audience and analyze it for valuable information on prospects.
Insights derived from the CRM, for instance, help to increase a marketer’s competency to predict customer’s online habits and interaction with your content.
You find prospects who will enter your sales funnel and convert into loyal customers.
2. Provide Value to Your Customers
Around 70% of millennials feel frustrated with brands sharing irrelevant emails. While you might think your email is to the point, your audience might share a different opinion.
However, B2B businesses can easily take out the guesswork by diving into analytics. It helps to determine what type of messaging and content pieces – visual or textual- resonate with your audience. To that end, you develop targeted content that users prefer to engage and respond to.
3. Identify What Works and What Doesn’t
Data driven marketing further helps pinpoint the content leading prospects into the sales funnel and away from the same. Moreover, you have a fact-based assessment of your strategy and campaign performance.
On that note, when you’re wholly aware of what’s working and what’s not, it helps to make better decisions on where to locate the budget and time of your team.
4. Use the Best Channels for Marketing
With marketing automation and data analytics tools, marketers can learn from which sources people came to know about their business or brand. This also works to inform about the social media platforms and websites each consumer visits frequently as well as the times and days a user can be found on them.
Using this information, you can figure out the best channels for your promotional campaigns and launch them at the right time.
5. Make The Right Use of Advertising Budget
Since data driven marketing is based on customer data and insights, it also helps to determine which advertising investment delivers positive outcomes. This is achieved by assessing the buyer’s journey with unified marketing measurement that integrates marketing analytics and attribution models to provide a comprehensive view of the performance of marketing campaigns.
To that end, you understand the impact of your efforts on the sales cycle and results delivered by different channels and touchpoints.
It gives a clear picture of what moves consumers into the sales funnel to allocate the adverting budget on marketing tactics and channels that delivers maximum results.
Strategies for Data Driven Marketing
Here are five data driven marketing strategies that help marketers secure a customer’s attention and generate desired results.
1. Segment your Audience For Maximized Outcomes
An important data driven strategy is to segment your audience base. This helps with other aspects of data driven marketing – email, social media, and direct mailing.
Not every member of your audience segment is to be considered equal. There are different consumer groups within a segment, and you must define them for targeted messaging.
For instance, if you are a SaaS development firm, you’d need to identify specific consumer groups for your products.
Having said that, numerous ways exist to categorize your audience. They can be differentiated based on the basic profile, such as gender or location. Or they can be segmented based on technographic or demographic details.
2. Develop Personalized Email Campaigns
Email marketing is deemed to be the most effective marketing method considering around 4 billion email users exist. Unfortunately, not every email shared by marketers gets opened. It is because the content is usually impersonal and irrelevant to the recipient.
Personalizing your email campaigns is the key to accelerating open and click-through rates and increasing your ROI and revenue. Studies have indicated that emails with personalized subject lines, such as the person’s name, are 26% more likely to be clicked on. Companies can secure 5.7 times more revenue in emails that employ personalization. Personalized emails make more sense to subscribers as marketers use specific subscriber information to provide offers relevant to their interests.
3. Take Advantage of Predictive Analysis
Another data driven marketing strategy involves using predictive analytics to help companies pinpoint behavior patterns in the data collected on customers. The patterns give insights into which customers will convert into qualified leads. Predictive analytics uses statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to determine the customer’s future actions.
Moreover, it gives organizations a glimpse into which marketing actions will succeed and which industry trends will positively impact marketing efforts.
To that end, marketers can understand how the customer will reach their specific campaign when launched. They can use shifts in demographics to ascertain whether the current marketing mix will attract consumers to purchase.
Simultaneously, by looking back at past metrics, companies can avoid future problems and prevent repeating past mistakes.
4. Apply Data For Effective Retargeting Marketing
Retargeting is one of the best data-driven marketing strategies because your prospective leads do not convert with the first visit. A site visitor can’t take the desired action you want in the first instant. Retargeting gives you second, third, and many chances to make a solid impression and influence decisions in your favor.
This data driven marketing strategy involves targeting those leads who visited your website or showed interest in your advertisement. Customer data enables marketers to resurface those products or services to that customer through email or social media marketing.
5. Harness the Power of Data Driven Website Chat
Live chat has become a prerequisite for every online business, be it B2B or B2C. However, not every client who visits your website and engages via live chat is worth your time.
With data, you can decide which customers to engage with and how to respond to them.
Whether the person is a frequent website visitor or a first-time viewer, you can figure out who you’re chatting with and respond in a manner suiting their needs.
6. Figure Out Who is Talking About You
A great data driven marketing strategy is using tactics like social listening and social media monitoring. It allows organizations to identify and assess what is being said about their brand, products, competitors, and what’s happening in their industry.
This is also a great way to improve your brand’s online presence and customer support as you monitor a prospect’s real sentiments towards your business. To that end, you immediately learn if there is some significant change in the number of people talking positively about your brand or negatively.
Moreover, social monitoring helps B2B ventures find important creators and thought leaders in their field to collaborate with and promote their offerings.
Wrapping it Up
In today’s competitive time, data can make marketing accurate and precise. Incorporating data driven marketing strategies and learning more about your ideal audience segment will give you a competitive edge. This, in turn, will boost your brand image and loyalty.
With customer data, you can convert simple marketing ideas into personalized messaging that captures the audience’s attention. Furthermore, it helps send the right message at the right time on the channel your customer is most active. To that end, data driven marketing helps you to better adapt to changing preferences and develop more valuable relationships that help your company secure growth in the market.
Leveraging the above data driven strategies will help you optimize your marketing budget and increase ROI and revenue. Most importantly, you will understand what marketing solutions are working successfully for your business.
