If your marketing campaigns or customer-facing initiatives rely heavily on data, you’re not alone:
- 53% of companies surveyed say data makes them more customer-centric
- In a 2017 study from Digital Doughnut, 63% of marketers said spend on data-driven marketing increased from the year before
- Data-driven marketing expenditures account for 20% of total marketing spend worldwide
There’s more to a data-driven strategy, however than just using data in your marketing operations. Data-driven marketing relies on insight-driven strategies, taken from big data that’s collected from customer interactions. You must understand the data you’ve collected, what you can mine, and how to analyze your findings and improve your customer relationship marketing.
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Data-driven marketing relies on using concrete data to determine strategy, but it’s not a once-a-quarter responsibility. Here are five key things data-driven marketers do every single day.
1. Set Goals and Make Plans
Collecting data without a clear idea of what to look for, how to use it, and why it matters is a recipe for disaster. Data-driven marketers always have a definite understanding of:
- Which initiatives or processes need improvement
- What data to collect
- The possible patterns that will justify change
- How these improvements will benefit the company
After setting goals and defining their rationale, data-driven marketers consider which resources they’ll need, from personnel to tools and technology. After planning out the course of action, the next step is data collection.
2. Collect Data
The data-driven marketing team is always looking for new information, trends, relationships, and anomalies within existing data. They must constantly brainstorm on how to combine data to improve their marketing campaigns and other initiatives. During the initial data dive, resist analyzing or screening each piece of data—it’s a waste of your team’s time and prevents them from overlooking valuable information. As Ascend2 explains in its Marketing Research Summary Report, 54% of companies say their biggest challenge in data-driven marketing is the lack of quality and completeness.
You’ll eventually pare down any irrelevant information, but the goal of this initial process is to collect as much data as you possibly can.
3. Organize and Interpret Data
Once the team has collected their data, the interpretation can begin. As mentioned earlier, the first step requires filtering out any extraneous data so you can focus on the data and metrics that matter. Data-driven marketers know that individuals interpret data in different ways, so focus your findings for various audiences.
For example, if your marketing team assesses a recent email campaign’s performance, you’d focus on open, click-through, and conversion rates—metrics that allow your team to take action. When communicating your findings to C-level management, focus on conversion rates and revenue generated. If you can show executives how your marketing efforts impact the bottom line, they’ll trust you to take care of the more nitty-gritty details.
4. Act on the Collected Data
Teradata’s 2015 Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey found that 87% of marketers consider data their most underutilized asset. Most marketers know what data they need and how to collect it, but aren’t fully driven by it. Operating with a data-first mindset is about as customer-centric as you can get. The data you’re collecting isn’t arbitrary; it’s your customers’ journey with your brand, and this information allows your team to develop content and initiatives for specific audience members.
Adopting a data-first mindset ensures you’re giving customers what they want. One of the benefits of a data-driven approach is that it allows you to challenge your biases and make improvements to areas you didn’t even realize needed improving.
5. Make Improvements to Data-Driven Processes
Constantly testing campaigns and individual initiatives allows you and your team to make improvements along the way. The more you focus on integrating data into your marketing processes, the more natural it becomes. In turn, your team will become more effective at:
- Determining which data to focus on
- Identifying the best places to search for data
- Organizing, interpreting, and communicating the collected data to various team members
With data at the center of every decision, you can feel more confident that your marketing decisions will lead to the best possible outcomes for your company.
