Marketers who want to stand the test of time need to start using data to drive real-time marketing strategies and influential consumer connections.
If you are looking to compete on today’s digital battlefield, taking a data-driven approach to your marketing strategy is no longer optional, it is a necessity. Recent studies reveal that 64% of marketing executives “strongly agree” that data-driven marketing is vital to success in a hyper-competitive global economy.
The contemporary consumer is tech-savvy, time-poor and more demanding than ever. A generic sales message or banner is useless and will do nothing to inspire, engage or drive conversions. You have to reach your target audience on a personal level, and a data-driven marketing strategy is the answer.
People receive between 300 and 3,000 marketing messages every day, but they can only retain a maximum of three. That is why yours has to count. Let’s look at how to build an excellent data-driven marketing strategy in four practical steps. In short, data-driven marketing refers to the insights, actions and decisions derived from analysing data around consumer behaviours and interactions.
1. Build your team and set your data-driven goals
Before you collect, analyse and use any consumer information, you will need to build the right team to deliver your strategy. To make sure the team is balanced, it should ideally include members from different departments across the company, laying the foundations of a multidisciplinary strategy.
A truly outstanding team will consist of people willing to collaborate, share ideas and go beyond their own expertise to work towards a common goal. Once the team is assembled, you will need to set clear strategic goals: your marketing KPIs. Discuss the data streams that will have a positive impact on your strategy and decide on the types of data that will improve the effectiveness of your campaign.
2. Collect your data
To reap the rewards of a successful strategy, you will need to gather the insights relevant to your end goals and KPIs from these types of primary data:
- Content performance data: public metrics such as social media performance, the success of your existing content (comments, shares, likes and search visibility) and the success of your recent campaigns.
- Marketing and social media analytics (clicks, impressions, conversions and more).
- Consumer and prospect data (web behaviour, transactions, online activity).
- Qualitative data (personal information and insights that help humanise your campaign).
Consult platforms such as Google Analytics and set up custom reports to gather statistics on how users interact with your website, along with demographic data such as age, location, device preference and interests. Other ways to obtain valuable information:
- Buyer personas: between three and four buyer personas often account for more than 90% of a brand’s sales. They provide an effective means of getting closer to your target audience and ensure better results from all your content marketing efforts.
- Competitor analysis: explore your competitors’ blogs, websites and social profiles to understand the topics they cover, how they promote content and which media they use most. Use it as inspiration.
- Keyword research: a valuable set of short-tail and long-tail keywords improves the SEO power of your strategy. Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush or Ubersuggest help you select them.
- Trends: discovering trending topics based on your industry, products or services (Google Trends, Twitter Trends) provides inspiration for email, social media and blog content.
3. Build your marketing content framework
Currently, only 7% of B2B marketers do not use content marketing as a critical part of their digital strategy. Engaging, inspiring, relevant and valuable content is the cornerstone of data-driven marketing, which makes content marketing a broad area of focus within your overall strategy.
4. Amplify, analyse, test and repeat
Once you have collected your data, created your buyer personas and developed your content framework, it is time to act by amplifying or distributing your content to your target audience. Review your current distribution channels and analyse which ones perform best, and consider the emerging platforms you could use.
After prioritising channels according to their value, create a calendar for all your content and marketing actions, noting where and when you will share each asset. This will give direction to your strategy and ensure maximum engagement. Creating marketing reports that track the actions you set out will help you stay on the right track.
Those marketing reports live better in a dashboard than in a spreadsheet. At Digital Fox Data we build marketing dashboards with Power BI, Qlik and Tableau and offer Business Intelligence consultancy to bring all your data sources together. Shall we shape your strategy? Get in touch.