How To Create the Best Data-driven Marketing Strategy

Marketers have a lot to gain from data collection and big data analytics. Vast amounts of customer data are collected every second, and this information is invaluable for enabling organizations to understand various industry trends, guiding them to make more impactful business decisions.

There’s no denying that having appropriate data helps marketers to set goals that are achievable and trackable, assess their current practices, and make educated decisions to achieve their goals.

With data-driven marketing, businesses expand their reach and tap into available and unexplored markets more effectively, creating larger customer bases with higher ROI. As analytics become increasingly complex and advanced, this approach offers an innovative way for brands to stay competitive in an ever-evolving marketplace.

This article will explore data-driven digital marketing and how it can help companies shape and make the most of the data-driven business strategy.

What Is Data-driven Marketing?

Gartner defines data-driven marketing as using information gleaned from customer interactions and third parties to obtain knowledge of a customer’s underlying motives, interests, and behavior patterns.

Data-driven marketing is an approach that relies on key data points to inform and drive strategies. Data-driven marketing strategies rely heavily on collecting and analyzing customer data, such as a customer’s past buying habits and interests, to create messages and campaigns tailored to that customer’s needs.

This approach has enabled marketers to become more informed decision-makers while providing insight into how customers interact with their brand or product. For example, brands can collect and analyze consumer interest data to craft highly-targeted marketing messages that will result in a high return on investment (ROI).

These insights can, in turn, be employed to shape future customer-driven marketing strategies or develop data-based marketing and industry trends for further research. By using data-driven marketing insights, businesses are given an unprecedented advantage in reaching customers with highly relevant content.

Key Takeaways

Data-centric marketing gives businesses the ability to achieve the following goals:

• Establish which ad copy will be most effective and impactful.
• Evaluate how effectively audience segmentation helps you reach the target audience and elicit the desired reaction and response.
• Manage existing and brand-new data to identify industry trends.
• Make timely customer connections.
• Gain more visibility and control over marketing channels and investments.
• Share insights across departments and foster a data-driven culture.

Data-driven Marketing Examples

It’s no secret that data collection and analytics are the foundation of data-driven marketing. However, most businesses struggle to determine the best approaches for using the data they gather to boost their marketing campaigns. Therefore, there are frequent disconnects between capturing information and coming up with creative ideas on how to use that data.

Here are the two savviest brands utilizing data to tailor every marketing message and product that boosts sales, engages the target audience, and increases lead conversion.

Data-driven Marketing Strategy Example #1

Data-driven marketing is a powerful tool for any business, and Spotify has become an expert in using marketing data to reach its customers. Spotify’s success is primarily due to its ability to capture and leverage data-driven marketing insights to deliver personalized experiences to its users.

Spotify takes advantage of the vast amounts of information it collects about its users by segmenting them into different groups based on their interests, behaviors, and usage patterns. That allows the company to send targeted messages tailored specifically for each user group.

Spotify has grown rapidly and continuously over the years. The graph below illustrates its consistent and remarkable upsurge in monthly active users (MAU).

Source: Statista

Spotify Wrapped campaign is an intriguing example of a company providing value through analytics-driven marketing. The company’s approach is based on repackaging and repurposing customer data for its users. It’s increasingly common for Spotify users to share pictures or screenshots of their Spotify Wrapped online, supporting its network effects.

The company also added other features to this campaign that deliver hyper-personalized experiences to clients. Let’s have a closer look at two of them:

• Listening personality: This feature offers over 15 listening personality types based on the listening patterns of every individual user throughout the year.

Source: Spotify

• Audio day: This feature is an immersive story that shows users how their music taste transformed through the day by highlighting specific moods, emotions, and aesthetic signifiers of the songs and music pieces they listened to.

Source: Spotify

By utilizing data analysis and machine learning to recommend new tunes, podcasts, and community events, the company offers curated and personalized content to satisfy users’ requirements.

By taking advantage of the vast amounts of customer information, Spotify can create more targeted messages and personalized experiences for their users, leading to increased engagement rates and customer loyalty.

Data-driven Marketing Strategy Example #2

Uncovering the secrets of customer behavior has become essential for marketers looking to reach their objectives over the next couple of years. Adidas has taken strides to foster a cohesive digital environment, creating an atmosphere that encourages team collaboration.

By analyzing and utilizing accessible data across the board, the company identified specific trends and patterns that can lead to more targeted connections with customers. On top of that, detailed analysis of digital data allowed Adidas to draw upon unique ideas and create innovative solutions.

The key is having a data-driven marketing platform capable of contextualizing this valuable information that provides meaningful insights while allowing brands to make decisions quickly.

After turning to the Google Marketing Platform, the company discovered that data is the key to unlocking powerful narratives and insights. It gave the company a window into understanding how to engage the target audience more effectively and help increase visibility across departments for improved performance outcomes.

Through the Google Marketing Platform, Adidas remains informed about its audience’s reception to campaigns as they develop and keep track of the data-driven messaging that proves most successful.

Why Is Data-driven Marketing Important?

It’s essential to consider the value that data-driven marketing can bring to your organization. By utilizing accurate and up-to-date customer information, you can make informed marketing decisions to reach your target audience more effectively.

You’ve probably heard that “data is the new currency.” Indeed, data empowers marketers to create effective campaigns and foster business growth.

Here are five principal reasons why you should implement a data-driven strategy for your business:

1. Personalized Marketing Campaigns

Consumers value tailored, personal experiences — with 79% of shoppers indicating they’re more likely to engage if the offer reflects past interactions. Creating and delivering these customized offers is an excellent way for brands to build customer trust and loyalty.

Personalization is an essential component of today’s data-driven online marketing strategies. By leveraging automation tools and analyzing user response rates, brands can create highly customized marketing content that speaks directly to their target audience’s needs and interests—leading to higher conversion rates and improved customer engagement levels.

On top of that, personalization is a tried-and-tested marketing strategy that sparks engagement with prospects and improves conversion rates.

Source: MarketingCharts

Naturally, personalization promises its users a host of benefits. Customers can expect an enhanced experience coupled with increased retention rates – leading to higher revenues. However, less tangible advantages, such as improved conversions or brand awareness, may not be experienced equally across the board.

Marketers know the keys to improving customer experience lie in understanding how customers interact with their service and emails. By leveraging data like ticket support requests, email opens and clicks, as well as the individual interests of each consumer, businesses can create more personalized experiences that enhance brand loyalty.

Source: Ascend2 Report

With careful planning, strategizing, and analysis, brands can create powerful personalized marketing campaigns and deliver personalized experiences that drive sales and revenue growth in today’s competitive landscape.

2. Better Insights Into Customer Behavior

Savvy marketers leverage data to inform their strategies and capitalize on the post-lockdown surge in demand. For instance, consumer goods companies use epidemiological statistics and municipal and traffic reports to pinpoint exactly where they should focus their media spend.

This hyper-precision approach helps them to reach a double-digit increase in sales, proving that smart use of available metrics can lead to powerful results and a compelling data marketing strategy.

Businesses must take a holistic approach to data collection to ensure the success of their precision marketing efforts. Gaining insights from sources such as customer behavior trends and location analysis is essential; however, leaders will further refine these findings by supplementing them with third-party analytics tools about their business and those of customers and competitors.

Companies leverage diverse data sources to optimize their models for a post-pandemic world. This nuanced approach enables organizations to gain insight into emerging consumer trends, recognize increased spending patterns among existing customers, and detect the transfer of former clients’ business elsewhere.

With data at their fingertips, companies can dedicate their marketing budget to areas with proven potential. Ultimately, brands equipped with the right solutions that empower customer data-driven marketing can connect online to offline buying journeys and remove the guesswork from their marketing campaigns.

3. Elevated Customer Experience

Creating an elevated customer experience is the goal of many companies today, and it all starts with a data-driven performance marketing strategy. Understanding how customers interact with you in each stage of the sales funnel is essential, as is developing targeted data-driven promotions based on their individual needs and preferences to craft an optimized approach to customer engagement that gets results.

Marketers recognize that personalization can result in tangible benefits, with customer experience being identified as the primary benefit this year. That is a shift from last year when marketers focused on increasing customer retention.

For instance, 2023 has seen more marketing teams achieving financial success through personalized campaigns and less reporting increased brand awareness, suggesting an even greater focus on data-driven digital strategy.

Source: Ascend2 Report

Consumers like seeing promotional content that is relevant to them. Through data, businesses can uncover important demographics about their audience to inform their marketing messages. Marketers can also use data to fine-tune their customer acquisition processes and improve customer experiences.

4. Effective Marketing Messages

Companies use multiple approaches to data-driven social media marketing and other channels for creating data-driven messages. They can analyze customer data such as purchase history or website activity to craft data-driven media plans with more relevant messages for particular customers or target segments.

Brands may also leverage AI and machine learning algorithms to generate customized content based on customer preferences and past interactions with the company. Finally, companies can use sentiment analysis tools to analyze the sentiment behind consumer conversations on social media platforms so they can adjust their messaging accordingly.

On top of that, marketers can experiment with different data-driven messaging and delivery methods to determine which ones convert more leads into customers. That can be accomplished using various data collection and marketing automation solutions such as Call Logic—Phonexa’s call intelligence software—and other tools, including behavior, click, email, customer behavior tracking solutions, and CRMs.

5. Data-driven Product Innovation

According to Accenture, an 83% increase in revenue is typical for organizations that understand the importance of data marketing and have an innovative approach to capturing its value.

Companies can position themselves for success by leveraging strategies designed for data-driven product innovation that facilitate differentiation and give them a competitive edge. Utilizing systems, automation, and tools to monitor measurable outcomes of experiments allow organizations to act swiftly on the information they receive.

Product managers who measure usage patterns through instrumentation are best able to identify which offerings will resonate with customers while informing support staff, supply chains, and manufacturing teams how to optimize processes and metrics performance.

Source: Accenture

As customer expectations evolve, product definition methodologies have adapted to focus on outcome-driven capabilities rather than merely experience-based features. This shift has enabled organizations to create products that provide greater value and better address consumer needs.

It’s essential to continuously elevate the quality of information through an iterative process to ensure data accuracy and trustworthiness. Sharing metrics across the organization promotes transparency, leading to higher confidence in its reliability.

Successful businesses have always relied on consumer feedback to improve their products and develop new solutions. The data-driven strategy makes product innovation and refinement much easier.

7 Tips on How To Build a Data-driven Marketing Strategy

As buyers become more informed and tech-savvy, marketing professionals must stay ahead by utilizing data marketing to create tailored data-driven campaigns that propel sales and customer loyalty.

While crafting an effective ad campaign can require more effort, having insight into consumer behavior should help strategists make better decisions on what products or services to pursue, how to target their ads, and ultimately how best to serve customers.

Here are seven ways you can build successful customer-driven marketing strategies for your business:

1. Invest in Marketing Automation Solutions

Marketers must be able to pivot as the new normal continuously evolves. To do this, an agile approach and advanced technology capabilities are necessary for success.

Through leveraging intelligent tech that can decipher customer intent and reactions, feedback is provided, allowing marketers to comprehend what resonates with their target audience and enabling them to reap maximum rewards in a continually shifting landscape.

With the help of AI and conversation intelligence, marketers are taking their campaigns to another level. They can monitor customer responses in detail and learn which strategies work best for different segments at specific times across various channels, allowing them to continually refine their data-driven digital marketing strategy based on valuable real-time insights.

Such marketing automation solutions like click, lead, call tracking and distribution, email and SMS marketing, user behavior, and predictive analytics tools can help you collect, organize, analyze, and present consumer data.

Predictive analytics, in particular, can be a valuable asset for businesses since it provides the potential to make their strategies more precise and knowledgeable about customers. Through analyzing trends in customer behavior, companies can craft a customer profile that allows them to tailor campaigns with greater accuracy and success.

For instance, Phonexa’s predictive analytics tool revolutionizes how brands generate leads. Its advanced analytics can quickly identify crucial sales patterns, and automated lead generation solutions use company data from existing conversions to maximize success in future endeavors.

Marketing experts looking to stay ahead of the curve in lead generation and leverage data-driven marketing automation can get a jump start with LMS Sync—Phonexa’s lead management and distribution software. It works hand in hand with such features as predictive modeling, automated analytics, call tracking, IVR, and more, allowing you to take control of your future success.

Ultimately, the success and failure of your data-driven strategy depend on the tools you select and how you integrate them into existing systems.

2. Use Existing Marketing Data

Examine the existing data to identify your company’s shortcomings and the best methods and strategies to fill the gaps. Look for patterns in customer behavior and use those insights to improve your understanding of customers and their needs.

Brands can also use this analysis to improve product development, pricing strategies, and other business decisions. Additionally, brands can implement data analysis to identify opportunities for improvement—such as optimizing website experiences or refining product offerings—and build data-driven marketing plans for executing those initiatives.

Your organization probably has vast amounts of valuable information sitting in your databases, and it can all be analyzed to provide insights for your next marketing campaigns. Before opting for external data collection sources, organize the existing marketing data in your CRMs, social media platforms, email marketing software, lead management system, and other tools.

3. Hire the Best People

Businesses are increasingly recognizing the importance of data-driven marketing and decision-making and their impact across many areas. For teams to maximize this shift in approach, companies should assess their alignment with marketing analytics and evaluate how much they can centralize related activities.

To remain competitive, hiring managers must take a fresh look at talent procurement by rethinking how they view specialized skill sets needed for success in today’s marketplaces. Here are several tips that can help you shift the company’s culture to a data-driven one:

• Organizations must prepare to align culturally and organizationally around marketing analytics.
• Hiring managers should tailor job descriptions to address specific team skill gaps.
• Companies should assemble a technical team of IT experts, data analysts and scientists, and traditional marketers to succeed.
• Utilizing a recruitment CRM system can help you track and manage candidate interactions and improve communication with potential hires.

4. Build a Data-driven Marketing Stack

Access to a wealth of customer data is essential for brands that want their campaigns to be effective.

However, this access can often come with significant issues such as fragmentation and duplication, making it hard to evaluate customers accurately. To succeed in today’s competitive environment, brands must find ways to unify their data sources into a single source of truth.

Companies strive to capitalize on customer interactions, understanding the impact each one has on their bottom line. They can gain a competitive edge in an ever-evolving market by embracing advanced data science models and data-driven marketing with detailed insights into customer touchpoints.

Data-driven marketing involves collecting data from multiple sources and across departments, from email to call tracking and feedback management to web analytics. As part of your overall data marketing strategy, build a marketing stack with different components contributing to your overall goals.

5. Run a Complete Competitor Analysis

Understanding the competition is essential to success. Through collected data, a competitive analysis can give you valuable insights into your rival’s strategies and identify areas where you can leverage strengths over them.

Relying on internal marketing data alone is not enough. Conducting a competitor analysis should also be part of your overall data-driven strategy. You can use different tools and techniques to collect and analyze useful insights into your competitors. It’s critical to be aware of what others are doing in your field to understand who else your prospects may be looking at.

Businesses can stay ahead of the game by consistently monitoring industry trends through this comprehensive process, giving themselves a better chance at capturing market share and more.

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits it offers to brands:

• Conducting a competitive analysis helps to identify your product’s unique value proposition and what sets it apart from competitors.
• It also reveals what the competition is doing right, providing insights into industry standards and how to outperform them.
• It provides an opportunity for businesses to discover areas of improvement in the marketplace that their competitors have not taken advantage of yet.
• Customer reviews can be leveraged as a source of information on features missing in competitor products so they may be added or improved upon within one’s offering.

6. Capitalize on Multi-channel Data

A multi-channel marketing approach leverages a range of distribution and promotional channels to communicate the value proposition for your product or service. These include data-driven email marketing, direct mail, websites, social media ads, display ads, and retail storefronts.

This unified strategy allows customers to choose their preferred way of procuring goods — whether through an offline retailer or an online store — so that marketers can efficiently reach more potential buyers.

Investing in data-driven marketing solutions enables the collection and organization of data across channels and departments in your business. The least likely data sources are what you need to increase sales.

For example, how can data from your customer care desk help craft your data-driven marketing approach?

7. Refine Your Strategies

Success in data-driven marketing is all about experimentation. Yesterday’s data and marketing strategies may not work today, especially in industries where consumer preferences are always shifting.

Data-driven marketing solutions are quickly becoming an essential part of the success equation for businesses. By utilizing data to inform your decisions and strategies, you can become more efficient in optimizing conversions and driving revenue growth.

With the right data and insights, marketers can create data-driven marketing programs and campaigns with higher effectiveness by targeting customers accurately and developing better messages that address consumer needs at the precise moment they are engaging with them — ultimately resulting in a dramatic boost in ROI.

Therefore, it’s crucial to use and analyze recently captured and existing marketing data to refine and adjust elements of your marketing strategy to address changing trends.

What Are the Advantages of Data-driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing provides a powerful way for businesses to reach their target audiences effectively while also saving time and money through increased efficiency. Let’s examine in more detail the principal benefits of developing and implementing a data-driven digital strategy:

• Real-time feedback to quickly analyze the success or failure of their marketing campaigns.
• Data-driven marketing insights for easy experimentation and comparison through A/B testing.
• Ability to track a customer journey and capture valuable details about how potential customers reach a company website.
• Capitalizing on further insights into multi-touch attribution strategies through data-driven marketing.
• Creating targeted campaigns for different segments of customers or launching new products based on customer feedback and detailed analysis.

Wrapping Up

Creating the best data-driven marketing strategy is a key part of having a successful overall business strategy. Having appropriate data helps marketers set achievable goals and can be tracked to measure progress. Data-driven marketing strategies also help marketers make decisions about their tactics based on hard facts, not assumptions or guesswork.

In addition to having an in-depth understanding of the data, businesses need to assess their current practices by evaluating what has worked in the past and what has not worked to gain insights into improving their operations. By having an effective data-driven marketing strategy, any business can ensure that they’re making informed decisions that positively impact their bottom line.

Schedule a consultation with one of our experts and discover how Phonexa’s all-in-one marketing automation suite can help you use data-driven strategies to get the most out of your offline and online data-driven marketing campaigns.

Frequently Asked Questions