Are you struggling to grab the attention of the modern “picky” customers? If you want to get your brand noticed, you should leverage data-driven marketing and boost personalization. 

In 2020, you need to start using advanced technologies and big data to produce new solutions and marketing insights. You should get a better understanding of the behavior of individual customers to promote your products and services more effectively.

Let’s consider six simple steps you should take to design a solid data-driven marketing strategy.

What are the benefits of using big data to power your marketing strategy?

Before we start talking about building a data-driven marketing strategy, let’s talk about the benefits it can bring you:

1. Boost communication with your target audience. Using big data, you can analyze the behavior of shoppers across multiple channels and discover the best avenue to market your products.

2. Improve market segmentation and get new customers. Try to understand how your customers differ one from another and divide your target audience into multiple well-specified segments.

3. Personalize the customer experience. With the use of advanced enterprise application development, you can identify potential customers’ triggers and pain points and find a way to personalize your brand message the right way.

4. Keep your marketing strategy up to date. Be aware of current industry trends that influence your business and adjust your plan to boost reach and engagement.

1. Define your goals

The first step is the most important one. Here you need to decide what specific goals you want to achieve. Do you want to optimize paid search or dynamic advertising? Or, maybe you thrive to boost your email marketing efforts? Once you get a clear idea of what concrete results you expect to get, you will understand what type of data you need to collect and analyze.

2. Specify what data you need

Using cutting-edge software, you can obtain literally any customer data. But it doesn’t mean that you need to collect all data possible! Data overload will not help you write a good marketing plan. Vice versa that may harm you. It will take you a lot of time to process tons of collected data, so you will not be able to make a timely decision.

Your task is to focus on information that matters. Let’s say your company sells umbrellas. You want to know at what time of the year people buy umbrellas the most often to optimize your marketing budget. 

To conduct the analysis, you need to collect only two data sets – weather data from the various locations where your customers work and live, and the company’s sales information for the last two years. That’s all. You don’t need to collect additional data from social media or your website.

3. Choose suitable digital marketing services and tools

Data-driven marketing is all about the use of big data. Obviously, you can’t collect and process big data manually. You need to do it using specialized tools and services.

Some tools can provide you with access to the data you are looking for. Other tools can help you with data storage and processing. Using the right business application, you can do the following:

  • Predict customer behavior
  • Identify repeating buying patterns
  • Predict potential preferences and interests
  • Discover emerging industry trends

We are not going to recommend any of the tools here. Why? Your company is unique, and your marketing goals are also unique. To make the right choice, you should test different business management software and find the one that fits you the most. 

4. Build the best team 

The next step is a challenging one. You need to build a team from scratch. Basically, your tea Business management software should be cross-departmental and cross-disciplinary. The team should include experts who have specific technical skills and also professionals who have a background in sales, marketing, and content production.

You should choose employees who are eager to master new skills and to learn more about the work of other departments. Don’t invite employees who lack the enthusiasm to join your data-driven marketing team! If you do it, your strategy will be doomed to failure.

In case if you run a small company and can’t afford to hire qualified employees, no worries. You can outsource some services or get help from freelance experts. For instance, if there is no in-house content creator in your team, you can take a look at the list of the best writing services and chose one that appeals to you.

5. Analyze industry trends

Do your competitors have effective data-driven marketing strategies? Do they use marketing automation to draw the target audience’s attention to their brands? 

You should keep a close eye on the competition and learn from your rivals’ mistakes. Like any other aspect of the business world, data-driven marketing is continuously changing. Staying informed and up-to-date on the latest trends in your niche, you can optimize your marketing efforts and achieve higher results in the long run.

6. Measure results and make some adjustment

You should understand one important thing about data-driven marketing. It’s all about continuous changes and adjustments, not about permanent solutions. 

Once you implement your data-driven strategy, you should measure results and find out what you have done right and what you have done wrong. You should analyze both: your mistakes and beneficial marketing ideas and rewrite your strategy to make it perfect. 

Market conditions are changing day by day, so you should continuously monitor the results you get and adjust your strategy correspondent. There are no limits to perfection, but you should strive to reach those limits. Your efforts will help your company to stay profitable in the long run.

In conclusion

In the age of fierce competition, it’s crucially important for every company to design an effective data-driven marketing strategy. So we highly encourage you to use the tips given and write your strategy from scratch today. 

And remember, you don’t have to be a data scientist to take advantage of data-driven marketing. With the right team and right tools, you can bring your strategy to life and take your business to the next level.

What data do marketers need?

Basically, 9 types of data are needed by marketers. They are:

  • Demographic Data
  • Technographic Data
  • Behavioral Data
  • Firmographic Data
  • Performance Data and Analytics
  • CRM Data
  • Industry Benchmarking Data
  • Psychographic Data
  • Intent Data

How do you do data driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is done in 6 steps. They are:

  • Define your goals
  • Specify what data you need
  • Choose suitable digital marketing services and tools
  • Build the best team
  • Analyze industry trends
  • Measure results and make some adjustment

What are the benefits of data in online marketing?

Data holds the key to the future of any business. Online marketing is no different. Here are a few benefits of data in online marketing.

  • Personalization
  • Easier Marketing Integration
  • Know What’s Working And What’s Not
  • Simple Segmentation
  • Pre-Target The Customers
  • Product Development

What are the latest free tools to help companies use their data better?

There is a vast option of tools which companies use to handle data. However, here are a few popular and stand-out tools efficient in handling data:

  • D3
  • Google Charts
  • Pentaho
  • Talend
  • Hadoop
  • Spark
  • Google Analytics
  • NoSQL DBs

Why is data driven marketing important?

Data-driven marketing helps marketers in identifying what works, what doesn’t and how to optimize marketing efforts with the most effective tactics. This process results in faster decision-making and better insights into what the customer wants from the brand.