In the era of digital marketing, there is something everybody talks about : marketing data. Data-driven marketing is a strategy that involves using data to inform and optimize marketing campaigns with the help of big data analysis tools.
With this kind of analysis, every company could gain valuable insights about customer behavior and buying patterns. And so, they create targeted campaigns for their audience that lead to improved engagement, higher conversion rates, and a better ROI.
In this blog post, we will explore what data-driven marketing is, how to implement it, and the benefits and challenges of this kind of approach.
Let's start!
Data-driven marketing is a marketing strategy that differs slightly from the traditional marketing approach. The traditional marketing approach is based on two pillars :
With this kind of marketing, you mostly trust your gut and your instinct. You need to try and fail to find good recipes.
In the strategic data driven marketing space, it's the complete opposite. Every decision you make is based on the data you collect about your users and audience. Think about a suggestion engine for an e-commerce website.
If you build suggestion engines based on traditional marketing for your e-commerce, you will upsell only the product you think is the best. And you could get totally wrong. But if you use data driven marketing, the engine will suggest products to the user that others have bought with the same products. As a result, you will have a better chance of getting a better ROI for these products.
Data driven marketing could lead to a large range of benefits for your marketing teams, not only revenue-focused ones.
By analyzing all your customer behavior, you could find a lot of pain points when users take actions on your website. And by solving this pain point, you could improve the UX of the website and, indirectly, your sales KPI.
You could also serve a personalized experience to your users, which could lead to better satisfaction and then better loyalty.
One of the primary reasons marketers consider data-driven marketing. Because you have access to all the customer behavior, you can detect patterns that lead to better ROI. Think about our example about your e-commerce store: if you could detect which products sell better than others, you could easily increase your average basket and, therefore, your revenues and ROI.
By using all the data, you can make accurate business decisions. If you saw that your product is really good because usage is high but sign-ups are low, you could easily focus all your effort and money on building a solid marketing team to help attract more users to the product. Conversely, if you have a lot of signups but few sales, you need to dig into the customer usage data and see when the customer "fails" to do something or view value from your product.
As you can see, data driven marketing has a lot of benefits. But there are some cons too.
Because you have a lot of data channels, like your website, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, etc., you need a way to gather all your data and display it in a convenient format.
Having data about your customer is only the start. You need to dig into it and find interesting insights that you could leverage and use for the benefit of your business.
The effectiveness of your data-driven marketing campaigns is dependent on the quality of the data you use. So if your data is incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate, your campaigns could go wrong. You can even lose money.
Collecting and using customer data could be problematic in certain countries. You need to choose carefully what and why you collect your data. In France or Europe, you need to be compliant with the GDPR.
Collecting, analyzing, and using data effectively can be costly, particularly for smaller businesses. The cost of acquiring and managing data can be a significant barrier to entry for businesses looking to implement data-driven marketing strategies.
But we will provide you with some tools that could help reduce the invoices at the end of the month.
You want to try to implement data-driven marketing? So let's focus on the how-to!
The first step is to define what you want to measure and what the goal of your marketing campaign is. We have written a guide about KPIs. Only work on one KPI at a time and with a bound timeline. But monitor all the other metrics closely. If you increase sign-ups but decrease your conversion rate, it could be a problem.
You need to collect a lot of data to be able to get some insights about your customer. Fortunately, there are some tools that can help with that :
When you collect user data, it's important to follow privacy regulations such as the GDPR or CCPA.
So now that you have all your data, you need to analyze it to get some insight into it. One of the most complicated parts is gathering the data. You have two solutions:
Once you have a way to store your data, you need a way to visualize it to get some insights easily.
Once the data is formatted, you need tools to visualize it. There are plenty of tools that can do that, but some are free and really good.
After that, you just need to put the optimization in place and monitor the KPIs.
Data-driven marketing is a fancy word but could really help you increase your KPIs. Do not start too big. Focus on one or two metrics, put your data in place, and start to analyze.
With the help of Catchr, you would gain some times because you can connect all your martking data in one click and send them to Looker Studio or Google Sheets.
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