Creative and innovative thinking help business owners survive in today’s competitive online space. No questions asked!
But, how creative are you? Wait, self-praise is no recommendation. After all, it’s your business, and you can’t let prejudices and biasness come your way.
Nursing the illusion that you were doing it all right won’t produce any fruitful result. If you are dreaming to corner the market, then thinking creative all the time will not help you climb the ladder of success. For achieving the desired heights in business; you have to be a man of few words.
However, before putting your plan into the action, first, you need to do the spadework so that each step you take can go in the favor of your business while outsmarting your competitors. It’s a cruel world.
In the torrent of efforts, have you ever tried to leverage data-driven marketing to uplift your business? If no, then till date, you have missed out on its exceptional business benefits.
When it comes to the digital marketing, leading companies, and experts now have realized the power of data-driven information. Though ROI plays a critical part for enterprises in decision making, still they leverage data-driven research and findings before making any decision.
Let’s explore to see how data-driven information help companies to fortify their digital marketing.
But, take a look at its introduction first.
What is Data-Driven Marketing?
In simple terms, data-driven marketing hinges on data. For making crucial business decisions like marketing and brand promotion, when a company uses data collected through different ways, it is said to be data-driven marketing.Now, you have become familiar with data-driven marketing. Let’s understand its importance.
Importance of Data-Driven Marketing
Take a glance at the following points that explains the importance of data-focused marketing:Data provides a strong base for marketing decisions.
Around 87 percent of marketers see data as the most underused asset within marketing departments.
Data-driven marketing empowers your inbound and content marketing.
The data-driven approach enables companies to optimize their processes to get sustainable results.
Want to explore it more, let’s check out this infographic, courtesy of Adweek.
Obtain Data from Different Data Sources
Based on the business domains, companies can get their crucial data from different sources. Various companies prefer to use collect primary data through online surveys. They use free/paid tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, Client Heartbeat, Survey Gizmo, and others to create survey forms.Apart from that, organizations obtain secondary data by tracking online social interactions and browsing behavior of the online audience.
Moreover, there are several other standard ways to get data. Let’s take a glance at them, one by one:
Google Analytics
According to Built With.com, around 21,124,746 live websites were using Google Analytics (GA). I guess there is no need to tell you about GA as everyone knows it pretty well. It is one of the extensively used analytics over the web, ever since its launch. It provides critical data regarding different marketing campaigns, audience insights, traffic details, top performing content, less performing pages, and so on.Facebook Insights
If you are running social media campaigns for your business then with the help of this features you will be able to:• Check your engagement rates for posts
• Track triggered actions on page
• Fans and their demographics
• Audience insights
Sales Transactions
You can get insights from monitoring company’s CRM or ERP systems. Data from CRM is usually categorized as identity data, quantitative data, descriptive data, and qualitative data.- Identity data typically contains all the necessary information that can be used to identify a customer uniquely.
- Quantitative data contains vital information about transactional information, social network activity, and online activity between the client and the business.
- Descriptive data includes additional info like lifestyle details, career details, and so on.
- Qualitative data involves vital information such as customer behavior, feedback, and motivation.
Marketing Team
You can get data from your marketing team to get insights about market bustles. The data provided by marketing team usually contains:• Survey report
• Customer behavior and demand
• Competitors score
Online Reviews from Company’s Website and Social Profiles
Getting reactions from your existing clients, first-time customers, and visitors is an excellent way to collect data. Data usually gathered through this method includes customers’ likes, dislikes, reactions, and so on.Apart from the sources mentioned above, you might get your data from other sources. But, once you obtain data, you would feel confident before making any decision for the best interest of your business.
Now, see the next point to understand the ways to create a data-driven marketing strategy.
How to Create Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
A post on data-driven post by Neil Patel highlights that first step of creating data-driven content is to understand it thoroughly. We have gone through that phase already in the fields above, so, lets jump straight to the point. Let’s see, how?Use the Power of Analytics
Want some actionable data that can help you turn around the things for your business? Then, Google Analytics can be your ultimate source from where you can obtain the most crucial data for your business. You can categorize the received information to use them in the best possible manner.
Integrate Data and Make It Accessible
As mentioned earlier in this write-up, there is no shortage of such companies that underutilize their data. Therefore, create a single and secure data storage point, and make it accessible to your workforce so that they can fetch the required data any time they need. Data encapsulation lets you encourage your audience to utilize data efficiently.Help Teams to Work in Collaboration
The success of any organization depends on the way its workforce performs. A data-driven marketing strategy helps you to create cross-functional teams that can work in a collaborative manner.
How Data-Driven Marketing Strategy Helps Businesses
Retouch Your Marketing Budget
Need I say that budgeting is a crucial activity of any business? Budgeting restricts you from unnecessary expenditure and lets you focus on things worthy of expenditure. However, this action heavily depends on the return on investment (ROI).With the aid of collected data, you can quickly identify the difference between the total cost invested in lead generation and the ROI received. You can get this data from your finance department that must be keeping the record of every single penny spent in the business.
According to the words of LAUREL MINTZ, companies that have been in business for one to five years should use 12 to 20 percent their revenue on marketing. While the companies that have spent more than five years should allocate 6 to 12 percent of their income on marketing. Let’s take a glance at the essential parts of marketing for allocating your budget:
• Brand awareness through social media
• Website
• Advertising
• Content marketing
• Events
Get a Competitive Edge over Competitors
You know what it needs to be the best entity of the market. Hard work, dedication, and the right strategy is the key to beat your competitors. Thus, analyze your competitors to get a competitive edge. For this, you can use powerful tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Rank Watch, and Buzzsumo.By using these tools, you get the most useful data about your competitors. However, your competitors may use the same tools to analyze your business. Don’t worry; it’s all about competition, and performing competitors’ analysis is not a one-time process. Business has become a dynamic process, and it needs constant hard work. Therefore, think creatively, keep performing analysis, cash out big events, and provide value to your buyers if you truly want to lead the competition.
Revive UX for Getting Exceptional Results
With the aid of Google Analytics, you can easily find out your underperforming pages, bounce rates, and the most clicked part of your website. User experience (UX) is something that touches human nerves and makes them feel connected with your site. Your website is the most effective marketing tool that can take your business on the ninth cloud if you optimize it according to your business requirements and observation. You can use these findings to revive and improve the overall UX of your site. Doing so will let you witness fantastic business results.Create & Publish Unique Content
Being engaged in business, you must have heard the phrase “More you tell, more you sell.” Numerous companies follow this notion to skyrocket their engagement rate that in turn increases the chances of lead generation.Look into your analytics to notice high-performing and underperforming content. Further, you can also leverage Facebook Insights to see your top-performing content so that you can create similar ones. Additionally, observe the content or posts which have given a steep rise in engagement rate. Whatever be your approach, your content has to be interactive in order to connect with the audience. Follow this guide on creating interactive content which is another field of study altogether.
Based on your findings, you can create and publish unique content, especially similar content that gave you high participation rates to make your campaigns more compelling.
Target Right Audience at the Right Time
You can get valuable insights from analytics to understand your audience well. Tools like Google Analytics (for websites) and social media analytics like Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, YouTube Analytics, or whatever you use for your online marketing campaigns provide you the details like gender, age, time, demographic location, language, and so on.With the help of this valuable information, you will exactly know where your audience locates, and what time they will be available online. With the aid of several automation tools, you can target right audience at the right time to make your campaign more powerful.
Give Effect to Personalized Lead Generation Process
Companies capture data with the help of landing pages, popups, newsletter subscription, and several others ways. Once you get their crucial data, you would be able to create personalized messages to target them through emails. Further, you can get relevant data from the way suggested above.People love when you give them importance, and by creating personalize messages like using the name of the customer like “Hi Ric,” your target audience will feel more connected. Consequently, they will read your message carefully, and this is the way you make your email marketing campaign more meaningful yet impactful.
Use Data to Make Your Strategy Highly Effective
While making crucial decisions for your business, you can rely on the data you obtained from different sources as mentioned above.Without a stout digital marketing strategy, you can’t even imagine standing out in the market, and cornering the market is a too far thing to achieve. Therefore, break your back; obtain the crucial data, so that you can use that to strengthen your digital marketing strategy.
Future of Data-Driven Marketing
Undoubtedly, the future of data-driven marketing is looking bigger, better, and more impactful. In coming times, companies will use it as a tool to triumph and dominate the market. Those who have understood its significance should leverage it without wasting any more of your time. Success comes to those who initiate; take proactive steps, and choose the road less-traveled.End Note
I tried to showcase how data-driven information is being used by leading marketers and companies to make their digital marketing impactful. You can also implement the points mentioned above to witness assured success.If you have got anything to add to the strategy, share it in the comments box below.
Author Bio:
Ruchi Pardal is the Vice President of ResultFirst-SEO Services Company famous for Pay for Performance SEO. She helps businesses make the most of their online marketing budget. You can follow here on Facebook, Twitter, Google+.
