What is Data-Driven Marketing?
Technology is an essential part of people’s professional and personal lives today, which means consumer data is more available to marketers than ever before. All of this data can provide deep insights into consumers – but with endless information, also comes a lot of responsibility.
Without a data-driven strategy, your data is nothing but a messy collection of numbers and touch points with no direction.
Data-driven marketing not only collects consumer information, but also implements these insights to better understand, predict, and deliver experiences fit to each customer’s unique interests, needs, and preferences.
According to a study by Dun & Bradstreet, the three most popular data-driven marketing tactics as of September 2016 are:
The greatest challenge with cross-channel and cross-device marketing is keeping up with users across all of their different devices and media platforms.
With the complexity of today’s dynamic consumers, identifying your ideal customers and targeting lookalike models becomes that much more challenging.
The Challenges of Data-Driven Marketing
Lack of Data Technology
Data technology is rapidly advancing to keep up with consumers’ ever-changing habits across multiple devices. One of the challenges of data-driven marketing is staying ahead of data technologies and gathering all the necessary information to track consumers.
Even though data-driven marketing is becoming increasingly important to companies, the discipline is not without flaws. According to one recent eMarketer article on data-driven marketing, many organizations have a hard time gathering high-quality data.
High-quality data requires accurate, up-to-date consumer information of verified individuals and their respective devices, email addresses, demographic and purchase information.
In order to stay connected on all channels, marketers need to combine their first-party data with third-party data to have a comprehensive understanding of their consumers.
Lack of Data-Driven Strategy
Building a strategy to organize and analyze consumer data is the most common challenge of data-driven marketing, differentiating companies from the rest of the competition.
41 percent of B2B marketers said their companies are currently using a Data Management Platform (DMP) to organize and analyze customer data. 13 percent indicated that they plan to implement a DMP in 2017.
There is more access to data, but it’s more important to utilize the information to gain a better understanding of each individual’s daily cross-device journey – whether he or she is using a desktop at work, a mobile device on his or her daily commute, or scrolling through a tablet at home.
Also, it’s essential to evaluate which ads on what devices are leading users through a conversion and attributing to a desired customer action, such as a subscription or purchase.
A data-driven strategy will be predictive as well as analytical of results to improve current efforts and guide future campaigns.
Data-Driven Marketing in 2017
Data-driven strategies are all about setting clear goals and interpreting your data to better understand and target people.
Here’s how you can stay ahead of your competition in 2017:
1. Invest more in data-driven marketing this year.
Marketing dollars invested in data-driven marketing is predicted to increasingly positive impact on companies’ revenues this year.
More than 40% of executives surveyed by the DMA and Winterberry expressed that Q4 2016 revenues generated by data-driven marketing efforts “increased significantly” or “increased somewhat.”
Don’t fall behind because you didn’t want to spend the money. Invest in high-quality data technology and implement it as a driving force in your marketing strategy.
2. Explore new methods of data-driven targeting.
It’s not enough to just analyze data as numbers, but rather understand them as valuable touch points to connect with consumers in a powerful way.
DMPs can serve as a powerful tool for data-driven insights that can enhance your ability to reach your ideal consumers.
Invest in a DMP (if you haven’t already) or maximize your current DMP’s capabilities to seamlessly integrate your CRM data (what you already know about your customers) with accurate third-party data to create actionable insights for your marketing campaigns this year.
3. Keep up with mobile data.
Ensure that your marketing strategy isn’t missing the biggest insight into consumers: their mobile devices.
Mobile device ID tracking is the key to keeping up with consumers’ cross-device journeys not only because mobile is their most utilized device, but also because a mobile device ID is a unique, deterministic identifier so that you make a one to one connection with a real individual.
Mobile will only become an increasingly vital component of your data-driven marketing strategy, in 2017 and the years to follow.
