Is data truly ‘the new gold’ in online marketing? If so, how do you extract value from your data? In this article, we explore how to leverage data-driven marketing to optimize your online strategy, enhance your reach, and foster business growth.

Meeting the demanding digital consumer

As the customer journey largely shifts online, and the number of digital touchpoints continues to expand, consumers increasingly expect highly personalized content across all channels. How can you meet these high expectations? Our answer: data-driven marketing.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is a form of marketing where you shape your strategy and create content based on data. This data typically comprises information from your customers, leads, and website visitors but can also include industry or market-related information. Since digitization, businesses have access to a growing array of data, opening up new opportunities for automation, personalization, and optimization of marketing activities.

Why is data-driven marketing so important?

When you base your marketing on data, you can enhance the efficiency of your campaigns and achieve better results. Here’s how: the more information you have about your target audience, the better you can tailor your content to their wants and needs. Instead of relying on assumptions, you look at the facts. For example, knowing the channels they frequent, when they are online, or when they prefer to make a purchase allows you to target more precisely and determine the ideal timing.

Additionally, data-driven marketing means using results to further optimize your strategy. By continuously analyzing and refining, you’ll consistently achieve better outcomes.

Data-driven marketing: 3 benefits

Here are three benefits you can expect from adopting data-driven marketing solutions:

With extensive data collection and analysis, you can understand visitor behaviour in detail: how do they come to your website? Which visitors are likely to convert? How loyal are your customers? How will these consumers behave in the future? Data-driven marketing software offers answers to these questions and many more. With the right tools in place, you can automatically optimize your marketing strategy, increasing your conversion rates and retaining your customers. For example, through market segmentation, lookalike marketing, and predictive analytics, you can target specific groups with content tailored to their characteristics, making sure you share your offers with the consumers who are most likely to be interested.

With the data you collect and its insight, you can offer your visitors new value propositions.For example, you could make your content more relevant to a specific consumer by automatically tailoring your home page to their wants and needs, while recommending unique products matching their profile. You can also create new ways of streamlining your customers’ engagement with your brand, including chatbots, omnichannel marketing, and image search facilities. These instruments will not only increase your productivity and save time, but they will also give your visitors the feeling that with your brand, their wishes will be taken care of every time.

Today’s consumers expect relevant content, and data-driven marketing enables you to meet this demand. At each stage in their customer journey, from awareness to retention, data-driven marketing will help you offer your customers positive experiences: from a tailored ad campaign that answers their exact query to a discount email that reminds them of the item in their basket, you can show them what they want, when they want it.

3 steps to setting up a data-driven marketing campaign

Would you like to start with a data-driven marketing campaign, but are you not sure where to begin? We have divided the process for you into three simple steps.

Find and define your data sources across your channels and set up a system for automatic collection.

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) can store the raw data before processing it into useable and actionable material. A CDP can also organize your data, making it easily accessible for your team while creating 360-degree customer profiles.

Whether you are looking to find new markets to target through lookalike marketing or want to set up an automatic email tailored to a prospect’s buyer profile, this is the step in which you set up and apply your desired automated actions.

Once your data-driven marketing system is in place, continually assessing its performance is one way of staying ahead of the curve.An important metric to consider when evaluating your campaigns is their return on ad spend (ROAS).

The challenges of adopting data-driven marketing

If data-driven marketing represents the future of online advertising, why are some companies still holding back? Here are some of the common challenges that are slowing down the uptake of data-driven marketing:

  • Lack of necessary experience, skills, and technology
  • Concerns about data privacy and lack of knowledge about regulations
  • Lack of high-quality or relevant data
  • Current data silos are inaccessible and, therefore, unusable
  • Too tough to get verifiable results or ROI

By working with an experienced partner and qualitative software like our CDP Spotler Activate, you easily build a futureproof data-driven strategy which helps you to face these challenges.

Elevate with data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing offers increasingly more opportunities to enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns, improve customer relationships, and continually optimize your work. Data assists in producing high-quality content that reaches your target audiences through the right channels at the right time. And you reap the benefits of this now and in the future.

Schedule a demo

Our consultants are ready to show you the capabilities of our CDP Spotler Activate. This way, you can quickly determine if it suits your organisation.