6 Steps to Help You Take a Data-Driven Marketing Approach

TL;DR:

• Data-driven marketing is a technique using data and analytics to enhance the customer experience and produce better marketing results.
• A data-driven marketing approach comes with a number of benefits, including refined customer targeting, an improved customer journey, greater marketing efficiency, and more.
• You can build a solid foundation for your strategy by following a series of six steps, including identifying your audience, investing in the right tools, and measuring your results.

If you’ve been relying on traditional marketing techniques to reach your customers, then you’re probably looking for new ways to promote your brand. These days, data-driven marketing is all the rage — and with good reason. This type of marketing relies on data analysis to refine your marketing campaigns so that you can improve your results. It can work a lot better than casting a broad net as you might with traditional marketing.

Keep reading to better understand what data-driven marketing is, what its benefits are, and the steps you can take to start with your data-driven approach.

What Is Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing is a technique that relies on data and analytics to understand your customers, personalize their experience, and drive better business results. It’s not just about collecting data for data’s sake. It’s all about using that data to make informed decisions that propel your marketing strategies forward. With data-driven marketing, you can say goodbye to gut feelings and hello to data-backed insights that deliver real results.

If you’re looking for examples of data-driven marketing, keep in mind that all types of marketing can be data-driven. Improving your social media marketing campaigns through the use of data would be considered a data-driven social media campaign, for example. Other common types of data-driven marketing include targeted digital ads, paid search campaigns, personalized content marketing, and personalized email marketing.

Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing Strategies

When you can harness the power of data, you can transform your marketing strategy and reap a multitude of benefits. Here are some of the advantages you can expect:

• Better customer segmentation that allows you to define highly targeted customer personas so that you can create personalized messaging that resonates with each segment
• The ability to use personalized customer experiences to enhance customer loyalty and retention
• A better understanding of the customer journey, which you can use to improve brand awareness, drive more conversions, and ease customer pain points.
• Optimized ROI since data-driven marketing is more efficient and effective
• Improved decision-making, so you can base business decisions and new product ideas on data-backed reasoning rather than spending lots of time kicking ideas around among stakeholders
• Better data on your competitors, which allows you to learn from their successes while avoiding their mistakes

Follow These 6 Steps to Implement a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy

The benefits are huge — but how can you get started with a data-driven approach? It’s simpler than you think. Just follow the steps below.

1. Improve Your Data-Handling Capabilities

Ready to rush out and start collecting data? Not so fast! It’s better to build yourself a firm foundation for a data-driven marketing strategy before you start diving deep into the details. That foundation begins with your tech stack. 

Make sure that you have a software solution like customer relationship management (CRM) software or another type of data management tool. The app or platform that you choose should feature the following:

• Simple integrations with the rest of the critical tools in your tech stack
• Connectivity with the social media platforms that you use
• The ability to import data gathered from your website and other online data sources
• Report generation tools so that you can examine every angle and create data visualizations

Essentially, whether you use CRM software or another data-handling tool, it should be a centralized place where you can consolidate all of your data and use it to measure various metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

2. Invest in Training for Your Team

Next up, it’s smart to make sure that your marketing team knows what to do with the data that you’ll be gathering. In fact, this can be a big problem for many enterprises. According to the Gartner Annual Chief Data Officer Survey, poor data literacy ranks as the second-largest internal roadblock to success.

Thus, part of your data-driven strategy should be to invest in data literacy training. Marketers and data analysts should understand not only how to read and contextualize data but also how to apply different analytical techniques that will allow them to successfully extract insights. 

3. Identify Your Audience

It’s possible to collect a virtually infinite amount of data — and with that, it’s possible to get lost in the weeds, too. That’s why, at the outset, you need to develop a basic understanding of your target audience and the segments that make it up. 

Find out who your ideal customers are and build customer personas to match. You can even invest in focus groups so that you can pose questions to real consumers and get honest feedback. 

Over time, as the data comes in, you’ll be able to refine and improve your personas — and even add new personas to your collection — but for now, basic personas will be your guide for the next step.

4. Identify the Data You Want to Track

Now that you have customer personas, you can move on to identify the most important data points for your marketing strategy. 

For example, an auto manufacturer probably doesn’t need details about which types of athletic shoes their target customers prefer, but they will need information about things like family size, average numbers of miles driven over given time frames, and so on. 

Meanwhile, shoe retailers will definitely want to know all about their customers’ athletic shoe preferences — plus other related pieces of information that can help them place the right shoes in front of the right people.

Those are examples of specific data points that brands can use, but keep in mind that most brands can also benefit from more generalized types of customer data. Think in terms of demographic information, income levels, customer purchasing habits, and more.

5. Invest in Tools to Collect Data — and Start Collecting

You’re almost there! Let’s talk next about where you can gather the customer information that you’ll need. Your data collection efforts should focus on a variety of sources:

• Activity and tracking information from your website
• Customer purchase behavior
• Interactions with your mobile app
• Social media activity and interactions
• Interactions with email marketing campaigns
• Details collected via loyalty programs
• Customer reviews and survey feedback

As you can see, there are a lot of options — and here’s one more: The personalized experiences that you can create through Jebbit. These include things like quizzes, surveys, lookbooks, real-time polling, and more. You can add these experiences to your website and mobile app, and you can promote them across a variety of marketing channels, including email and social media. 

With these experiences, you can gather activity information as customers interact with them, and you can also learn a lot about customer behavior, purchasing habits, and more from the answers that respondents provide. On top of that, you can set up experiences to capture email addresses so that you can leverage the data that you’ve collected to target the right customers with the right marketing messages via email.

From Howe, a leading retailer of diesel additives and lubricants, comes a great example of how Jebbit can help you gather high-quality data. Using Jebbit, Howe created a farm and agricultural survey, which they then launched across paid media channels, targeted toward farming audiences. The goal was to build awareness about the brand and their products — and through the data that Howe collected, they were able to optimize and refine their audience segments for retargeting.

The quiz was massively successful. Fifty-one percent of users who clicked on the quiz engaged with it. The brand experienced a 250% conversion gain from look-a-like audiences, and they collected more than 12 million attributes along the way.

6. Analyze Data, Optimize Marketing, and Measure Results

Now that your data is coming in, it’s time to use it to optimize your digital marketing campaigns. Here’s what you should do:

• Revisit your audience segments and buyer personas to refine them. Improved information on demographics, budgets, customer preferences, customer needs, and purchasing behavior can all help you to find the right price points and put the right products in front of the customers who want them.
• Use data analytics to improve paid marketing efforts. Specifically, track the performance of the keywords you’re targeting in paid ad campaigns — and use data to refine your strategy and improve the ROI of your marketing spend.
• Leverage marketing analytics to enhance your website. With browsing information, you can find out which pages people visit the most, where they spend the most time, and where pages need to be improved to boost engagement so that customers don’t bounce away.
• Delve into survey feedback and customer reviews to get a handle on customer needs, preferences, and pain points. This will help you make better decisions about how to please customers and keep them coming back for more.

The data-driven approach is all about continuous refinement, so make sure to measure results across the board. Successful data-driven marketing should result in more website activity, more customer interactions on social media, increased engagement, improved retention, and rising conversion rates. If you’re seeing problems in any of these areas (or elsewhere), look to the data to gain insights.

Improve Your Data Collection Efforts With Jebbit

The data-driven marketing approach is one that allows you to refine your target audience and your messaging so that you can create more personalized messaging for each of your customer segments. That personalization translates into big benefits: Not only more conversions, higher loyalty, and better retention but also a better ROI on your marketing spend too.

Along the way, you’ll need to be able to create engaging content that gives customers the ultimate in customized experiences. That’s where Jebbit comes to the rescue. Rely on Jebbit’s tools to create fun, insightful quizzes, surveys, polls, and other interactive experiences. To learn more, schedule a demo.