Marketers will agree that marketing is both art and science. However, a few years ago most company owners would define marketing as a creative industry requiring intuition, imagination, and talent, just 5% would have mentioned big data as the core of their success. Those days are gone.
The thing is “Will data define marketing?” or “Will human creativity and uniqueness still be the cornerstones of the advertising, or will they be completely replaced by algorithms?
Let’s look at the benefits of data-driven marketing, how you can use it to get tangible results and how you can deal with the challenges.
How to use data in marketing?
#1 Make it More Personalized
Actually, the biggest advantage of using data-driven marketing is the advanced ability to create highly-targeted campaigns with personalized messaging. Moreover, data-driven personalization generates greater ROI on marketing expenditure.
With data, marketers can measure the effectiveness of every piece of content published on each social channel and optimize content based on topics that engage customers.
For instance, you can identify a set of users who engage with a Facebook post about the ways real estate agents can use digital marketing tools and send them an email featuring your special offer.
#2 Filter What’s Working for You
Now, we know that data-driven marketing facilitates the personalization of content. If the marketing message meets your users’ needs, they will show their appreciation through increased engagement. Your campaign worked! You have more likes, shares, and tags! With increased engagement comes brand loyalty and with brand loyalty comes enhanced brand perception. In the long-term, this generates more purchases, trust, and triggers brand advocacy.
Thus, data-driven marketing helps you to define specific content that is leading potential clients through your sales funnel. This could help you in determining exactly where your time and budget should be spent.
#3 Improve Your Content
The insights gained from the data will allow you to continuously enhance your marketing campaigns in tune with the customer’s ever-changing needs. Data-driven marketing can help your business deal with new information to improve the quality of your products and services and keep up with changes in the marketing field.
Using data-driven tools improves the overall quality of your strategy as long as you’re refreshing your database often enough. Find ways to know more about your potential customers to create your data-driven content marketing strategy.
You need to understand your customer’s habits, preferences, and needs. This involves gathering different sets of data followed by a careful analysis of your data.
Challenges of data-driven marketing
Working with data, you probably know that something’s always happening. It’s super dynamic! And like most valuable business strategies, there are challenges to successful adoption of data-driven marketing. Get ready, here are some of them:
- The right team: Start learning data science fundamentals. Because of being a skill-demanding job, it can be challenging to attract talent.
- Departmental silos: To have successful data-driven marketing you should have high-quality and integrated data, which is not an easy task. Frequently, different departments will acquire data with divergent goals.
- Integration: If you fail at the integration process, you can struggle to gather the right data needed for a unified customer view. For instance, retail companies and e-commerce companies are often challenged with the task of collecting and structuring data from social media and mobile devices.
So?
Nowadays, marketing strategies based on data can help you stand out. It gradually becomes the best way of making every client feel special. This approach towards marketing helps create micro-niches, where every customer is essential, and a personalized solution to each of their problems is available. The solutions sometimes just pop up on their screens. A creative data-driven marketer over there understood their needs and came up with viable solutions before they could ask for help.
