Companies’ marketing departments are rapidly growing and moving towards new technology, sources, and strategies. Datasets for marketing have become an important source in revolutionizing the way marketers act, make decisions, and form campaigns. 

Let’s take a closer look at data-driven marketing…

What Is Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing is a type of marketing approach that involves using data for all processes, such as building marketing strategies, producing campaigns, collecting data about customers’ traits, and analyzing competitors in the marketing industry. 

As of recently, over 50% of organizations consider data-driven marketing an integral part of their marketing approach. However, before using any data in marketing processes there are a few key basics each marketer should understand and work by:

Key Basics to Understand Data-Driven Marketing:

1. Customer-centric approach. Every business evolves around its customers, meaning all data that is being implemented into marketing efforts should be based on the customer. 
2. All data may offer insights. The amounts of data produced daily are unreal, covering all of it is tough, so marketers choose to analyze only the most important points. However, that doesn’t mean the other data points are useless, they in fact can be insightful depending on your business needs and goals. 
3. Collect data. Often datasets can miss valuable information or store outdated data, so instead of leaning on what you have, you can always ask the client to provide valuable answers and talk about their interest. You’ll never do anything bad by asking, but not asking and missing out on that data can take a big toll on your marketing. 

Roadmap of Successful Data-Driven Marketing

As you decide to incorporate data in your marketing efforts, there is a certain roadmap that you must follow to set up a well-defined work process and clearly outline all data processes. Here are the recommendations you should consider:

Analyze and clear the data you have

There are many sources you can find to collect data, but many miss the most important source they already have – their existing data. When you start to evaluate your data you’ll find that you have many insights, moreover, the data is based on your existing customers meaning that you can learn much more from it than from data that’s from another business with a different customer base. 

Learn to integrate information

Research conducted did show that 8 out of 10 senior marketers believe their organization could be doing a better job of using customer data to inform customer acquisition and retention strategies. Data specific to your industry, company, and customers should remain your main focus, however, integrating it with other information will provide other aspects. 

For example, integrate your customer behavioral data with the weather reports to predict future buying patterns and produce a campaign that will interest your customers in such weather conditions. 

Combine datasets

Whether you have access to a few datasets or you’re working together with other firms, you should always combine datasets to receive the ideal insights. Two similar datasets can include different dated information or even data that the other is missing. 

Sharing data with other firms might seem useless, however, even the most polar opposite businesses can complement each other’s data and strategies. 

Measure and track progress

As you have defined your data, integrated it, and blended it, don’t stop there, you need to constantly monitor and track it after that. Even the smallest changes in data can imply a problem in your campaign or a mistake in customer conversion bots. By noticing mistakes at their early stages you can always use other data to fix the strategy before it reaches too many customers. 

The Benefits of Implementing Data-Driven Marketing

Although many companies are still reluctant to integrate a data-driven approach, 2 out of 3 leading marketers have admitted that data-based decisions beat the gut instinct. For those who are still on edge, here are the benefits of data-driven marketing:

The benefits of data-driven marketing:

• Gain clarity on your audience. Insights from data will allow marketers to form a picture of their target audience, they will be able to set behavioral features, traits, interests, budgets, etc. 
• Improve connections with customers. A well-formed campaign that will match customer engagement and needs is the secret to a great connection, to build such a campaign all you need is data.
• Uncover the best channels for campaigns. With data that reveals your customer interests, you can also detect which channels they use most, and position your messages where they are most likely to see them. 
• Predict potential outcomes. Use customer interest data to predict future outcomes, such as how much product you need to manufacture so that every customer gets at least one and you don’t have too many left over. 
• Data-oriented budget optimization. For budget optimization measures you should look at performance data of previous campaigns and measure their effectiveness. You can pinpoint channels that aren’t effective and invest that money into the effective channels for a bigger outcome. 
• More opportunities. With the right tools for data analysis, you’ll have much more business opportunities. Learn about trends and unfilled business gaps first with data. 

Final thoughts

Data-driven decisions are becoming an essential part of every marketer’s job. The information you can gain about a customer, campaign, or trend from data is always informative and valuable.

As you adapt the data in your marketing insights and strategies you’ll develop a strong relationship with your customers and will be able to adapt to any market changes.