The Importance of Understanding Data Before Fleshing Out a Marketing Strategy
Data is quickly becoming one of the most expensive industries in the world, and is estimated to be valued at more than $130 billion, and is expected to nearly double in just the next five years.
As more and more companies move to a greater reliance on ecommerce, more and more data becomes available and can be used to inform team members in any and all aspects of business. One of the most data-driven of these aspects is marketing, and sound data analytic work can help your marketing team narrow your niche, find your exact target audience, know what that target audience is currently excited about, and even know what they will be excited about utilizing an aspect of artificial intelligence known as machine learning.
As great as data is, so much goes unused simply due to its novelty and members of the PM and Marketing Strategy Teams simply not knowing how much of a tool they have at their disposal. Thus, understanding your data, how to use it, and how to collect more relevant data to measure your marketing strategy is an easy thing to focus on to increase the success of your marketing strategy. Here are three ways data-driven marketing can help your team right now.
Consumer Information
Even if you have the most creative, innovative, and technically sound marketing campaign if it fails to reach the right people who will see it and think they have a need for a product or service. More than two-thirds of marketing executives believe that utilizing data to define their target audience is “crucial for success.”
This data allows you to see things like similar products purchased by potential consumers, and can also inform your team on when the best time to push a marketing campaign is, based on the times of the year your potential customer base is more likely to purchase a product or service similar to you. In addition, this consumer data informs marketing teams of which online marketing efforts were the most frequently engaged with (clicks, comments) for similar marketing campaigns.
Ultimately, these things can be achieved with market research, too, but allowing database technology to grow your marketing efforts is an extremely efficient move your team can make relatively easily.
Customer Retention and Growth
Data also allows for a much more seamless stream of communication between customers and your team, both overtly and covertly. The overt messages are things like comments on social media sites or review pages that can be quickly scanned by data software for certain keywords or common keywords among multiple users to deliver you information regarding customer satisfaction on a grand scale, but it can also serve as a way to see what other things customers were shopping for when they bought your product or service, and finding trends there can help you gear your marketing strategy towards those customers.
For example, you may see a trend of consumers who bought your product and also bought another product you used to not think was similar, but in fact, that second product can be used with yours to enhance it, and now you have a whole new set of potential customers.
Granular Marketing
Data also allows you to determine very fine niches of individuals who have shared demographics and seem to always buy your product or service. By utilizing data and realizing that a given niche (we’ll say 60-year-old men in Delaware), you can create marketing campaigns for smaller markets knowing they have a great chance of having a high ROI if the niche market is almost certainly going to buy.
As is pretty much every aspect of ecommerce, trends in digital marketing are going to change frequently as the system mellows itself out after COVID has finally become a thing of the past. Stay current and use your data to see where trends will be! Then use it again to market intelligently.
