The global upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly transformed the way businesses operate and has tremendously impacted market demand and consumer behavior.
Some companies started to hire an Android developer or an iOS one to create mobile apps, while others put much effort into web development and social media coverage. Going online has become a necessity rather than an option for many businesses.”
Digital marketers are now considered as the link between business and customers and had to drastically reimagine marketing to anticipate customer requirements, adjust priorities as well as deploy new strategies with agility.
Data-driven marketing is one such strategy that helps businesses to generate new insights from data, identify better business opportunities, enhance customer services, grow revenues, improve operations, and much more. It allowed businesses to leverage evidence-based data to make decisions and plan carefully to pursue business objectives. Business owners no longer had to make blind decisions but could precisely plan strategies based on the data obtained.
While several organizations have some form of data-driven marketing implemented, strategies are being introduced in piecemeal fashion, within siloed business units, without fully taking advantage of the available resources. This is because several online business owners are still not completely aware of the multiple benefits of data-driven marketing and continue listening to their gut during the decision-making process. This misleading information and choices could result in specious outcomes in which the company will have to suffer from substantial losses. Therefore, it is imperative that businesses incorporate modern marketing models into their operations and successfully capture consumer hearts and minds in a rapidly changing environment.
As the name indicates, data-driven marketing is the procedure of collecting data and using it to make the best decisions for the growth of a business. This data can be accumulated by the business or digital marketing team from different platforms, including business websites, social media campaigns, call center data, surveys, and much more. Once businesses have collected these data from different platforms, the marketing team can help determine the best branding and sales strategies to increase conversion.
When such relevant data is accurately gathered and used effectively, it can help businesses reach their target audience, understand how to improve products or services, and suggest better ways to increase revenue.
How Can Businesses Benefit from Data-Driven Marketing
If you want to create positive results from marketing strategies, then it is imperative that you do not create strategies without any relevance but focus more on the results generated through data-driven marketing. Data accumulated through social media campaigns or Google ads, informs decision makers about their customers, their preferences or interests, dislikes and much more. It provides the business with relevant information to make decisions at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Therefore, businesses can provide more personalized services because they already know what the customer likes and dislikes. This will significantly help the business to convert visitors from prospects to potential customers to actual buyers. It is not only beneficial to increase revenue but will also help in customer retention, increased website click through rates and average time spend rates will also increase because of the highly personalized content. Developing such valuable relationships with your customers will help your business better adapt to their changing requirements, thus enhancing your brand to become better able to compete in a changing market.
Evaluate your existing business strategy
Every business has a unique set of marketing strategies implemented in order to target its potential customer base and generate leads. But these strategies may not all work as expected because some may bring poor results while others would bring in tons of traffic to your website. For businesses to know what worked and what did not, it is essential that they focus on data acquired from these marketing campaigns.
For example, if your business has hired a digital marketing agency for search engine optimization (SEO), your results will be increased organic traffic and ultimately higher conversion rates from those visitors. But if the marketing agency has focussed on pay per click (PPC) ads, then you can expect more paid traffic and search. Therefore, while analyzing the data, if the agency finds that the results are not promising enough, they can implement another alternative marketing strategy. It helps businesses to eliminate not beneficial marketing campaigns and focus on more relevant strategies that bring in better results.
Understand your customers
Your products or services will obviously have a target audience, sometimes it can be based on age, gender, geography, etc. Businesses that do not understand their target audiences will find it extremely challenging to generate leads and convert customers. By implementing data-driven marketing, businesses can gain relevant information to better understand customers. They can analyze which campaigns were successful and can gain in-depth insights into the visitor’s interest. Such as which age group interacted the most or which gender were the most interested and much more. With this data, they can create better campaigns that focus more on the customer’s interest and hence attract more potential leads.
Improve business ROI
Not all social media platforms or marketing channels are relevant for a business. Some businesses will have more visitors to their website from Facebook while others might generate traffic through LinkedIn. Businesses must therefore understand which platform is delivering more leads and focus on paid promotions or daily advertisements on that platform rather than focusing on the one which brings no lead.
This marketing approach can significantly reduce unwanted expenses and increase ROI for the business. The business can also invest more of the marketing budget in the channels and strategies that produce the highest returns, thereby, attracting more customers and increasing the branding opportunity.
Tailor your content to your customers
With data-driven marketing, businesses can identify the keywords that bring the most amount of organic visitors to their website. Businesses can also detect which landing page or content gets the most number of visitors. Such data are essential for brands to create more content related to the highest-ranking page or keyword. Therefore, more similar pages, blogs, case studies, whitepapers, etc can be created and all these pages can be used to generate more leads. Businesses can focus on personalizing their content around the most visited page and tailor their content to individual visitors using marketing automation tools.
Increase your conversion rates
Every business website’s ultimate aim is to drive improved customer conversions and revenue. By continuously monitoring the data and analyzing the conversion rates, businesses can identify which web page has the least conversion ratio and which has the most.
This relevant data can be leveraged to improve the inner pages so that digital marketing agencies can implement necessary modifications which will eventually increase customer conversion. The best strategy is to implement an A/B testing method and recheck if there are any improvements in that page, if not try changing the content, calls to action (CTA) buttons, images, keywords, etc. or even create a new page for that service.
How Can Your Business Create a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
Planning a data-driven marketing strategy for your business requires time and resources, especially if your business has multiple domains such as IT, marketing, sales, etc, because an effective data-driven marketing strategy requires expert analysts for all the mentioned domains. You can also hire digital marketing service providers who will help you achieve your goals with lesser expense when compared to an in-house team.
Digital marketers will have the necessary tools to analyze data for each domain and will have the expertise to understand which data is relevant and which is not for the growth of your business. But if you are a startup or small business that cannot invest in data-driven marketing options, then one of the easiest ways for you to track data that comes to your website is by leveraging web analytics tools. You may purchase cloud-based SaaS tools that provide business dashboards and complete access to data or even use free tools such as Google Analytics to make sure that your marketing team can use the data from the website to their advantage. But first, here’s how businesses can create a data-driven digital marketing strategy
1) Set Realistic Marketing Goals
Every business owner will have several goals and expectations from their online website. Being optimistic and setting goals is really good but during the initial phase of testing out a data-driven marketing strategy, it is always better to set a limited number of marketing goals. This approach will let you easily determine which data is crucial for the business’s success and which does not provide any value. Limited data is always easy to manage and can help business owners make quick decisions.
Big data or large amounts of data in the initial phase will create a complete mess and decision makers will be totally confused about what to do with all the data. Also, keep in mind that data is not always the same and changes based on customer trends or market demands. Therefore even if you have gained the necessary data and implemented a marketing strategy always make sure to analyze the data at least three times a year. This will ensure that the data is not outdated and still valued.
2) Collect data
Once you start with the basics of accumulating data from platforms such as Google Analytics and Social Media, make sure that the data is handled by experts in that particular domain. For example, data acquired from Social Media should be handled by Social media managers and social networking experts. Meanwhile, data gathered from Google Analytics or other website data analytic tools must be handled by SEO or digital marketers. Make sure to also use a data pipeline that complements your business model. There are many reverse etl use cases that you might find interesting, especially if you’re into SaaS.
The experts in the respective domains will be able to make the most out of this data and create marketing strategies such that there will be an increase in lead conversion, page visits, or whatever your website goal is. Moreover, in the case of social media, it is wise to not completely depend on the insights received by the respective platforms but also to manually check each post. This will provide better and more accurate data, as social media managers can understand the background, job, age, gender, and much more of the people who have engaged with the post. It clearly shows the type of people that are interested in your products or services, therefore, social media managers can create posts that target these audiences.
3) Assess and Refine
Yes, there is no doubt that social media tools and website analytics will provide you with tons of data. But not all this data will be useful to your business. Therefore, businesses must initially implement a strategy where the data are thoroughly evaluated and only the most relevant data is gathered. Every customer has a unique requirement and looks for a tailored strategy, by identifying such narrow interests, businesses can further personalize their services. It will help you not only target the bulk audience but also reach out to niche people with a certain area of interest. Also, as mentioned earlier, not all data will be useful, therefore make sure to test and verify the campaigns first on a small basis and then completely commit to new changes in your approach.
But also, there are times when a marketing strategy does not provide good results, hence, business decision makers will tend to write off such a campaign entirely. This strategy can be unwise, as there could be several elements that cause the strategy not to work. It could be the time period, market trends, or anything else that causes the failure. And maybe in the future, these marketing strategies could bring in positive results if the market conditions and all are favorable. Therefore, do not completely eliminate the marketing strategies that do not work but keep it for a trial and test method in the future.
Conclusion
With data-driven marketing, businesses are now able to make informed decisions regarding everything from product development to deployment. Because data-driven marketing is based on accurate results, businesses no longer have to trust speculation and make wrong choices that affect their growth. But rather they can leverage it to their advantage and rank over competitors who are not making the proper use of data-driven marketing. Therefore, if your business isn’t already taking advantage of data-driven marketing, it is best that you hire a digital marketing agency providing website design services in Toronto and leverage the benefits of relevant data analytics.