10 Elements of a Successful Data-Driven Marketing Strategy in 2020

In order to understand customer behavior and how a brand or product is being perceived, marketers need to rely on sound data, especially in 2020.

Data-driven marketing is all about custom-tailoring a brand's message to receive the best response from target demographics. All of this is dependent on using the best methods to capture and organize data into useful analytics.

Email is the most popular method marketers use to share data, for example. Press releases, up-sells, and curated content are all easier to deliver with data marketing that can build a profile of interests and behaviors. When a customer receives personalized content, they will be more open to purchasing or bonding with a brand.

The strategy of data-driven marketing isn't so straight-forward, otherwise, you would see less marketing blunders and tone-deaf delivery of products these days. The key is investing early and building your marketing strategy around the idea of data and marketing being intersectional.

Let's take a closer look at how data impacts marketing before we get into how you should build your marketing campaign.

Data-driven Results

When it comes to personalizing the customer experience, you have to be accurate while following customer trends. It's hard to predict the future, but what you can predict is behavior. Comprehensive customer data can be used to segment and categorize customers.

In the case of data-driven marketing: more data is better, but organized data is best. If you can build a profile out of just a few data points, then you can personalize a shopping experience much more effectively. A profile beats a single previous purchase history when it comes to predicting behavior.

Ultimately, predicting customer behavior requires a look at the big picture: their profile, market trends, and purchase history.

A brand that isn't data-driven in their marketing paints with a much broader brush, therefore they are more in the dark and often times must “brute force” their marketing campaign.

In fact, data-driven marketers are six-times more likely to gain a marketing edge and achieve a higher ROI.

Funnels and ROI

It's much harder to funnel customers in this age of online reviews and social media recommendations. That's why it is so important to stay a step ahead by predicting customer discoveries. If you can meet your target customers at their “ready to buy” stages (media reviews, price-watching, and organic searches), you can turn that data into dollars.

Data-driven marketing tools help focus campaigns and achieve the best ROI. Advertising messages and survey tools can be used to measure conversion rates while building an even more accurate profile of customers. Your marketing budget essentially does the work for you, once you have a solid foundation.

In contrast, traditional marketing campaigns are more one-and-done, with very little useful data that can be used for the next rounds.

Putting it All Together

Before you start seeing results, data has to be gathered from multiple sources in order for data and marketing to work seamlessly. Some good examples include social media engagement, cookies, search queries, and location data. In fact, geolocation data alone can give you multiple data points, including income, age, race, and more.

All this data collection can be overwhelming to your average marketing team. A data-driven strategy employs smart profile databases, visual organization, and highly coordinated content based on data. Investing in this type of marketing should not be for the faint of heart. You will not see quick turns on investment.

Are you ready to put a winning strategy together? Here are the 10 most important keys to a data-fueled marketing strategy.

10 Elements of Data-Driven Marketing

This list is important for any startup or established brand who has seen mediocre ROI in their marketing and advertising. If you are contemplating cutting your marketing budget because PPC ads are producing the only real results, then take notes on this data marketing list.

1. Your Ideal Customer Profile

We start with the most obvious, yet easiest thing to screw up in data-driven marketing. How you build your ICP will determine where you'll move in sales and social media marketing. Start with the basic buyer's habits when building out your profiles.

If you have a sales department, make sure you qualify all that data as much as you can before moving on to categorizing your leads. Match these profiles up with hard data, like economic census surveys.

2. Tracking, Gathering, and Editing

Before you get too ahead of yourself, you have to have a system in place to sort out your data. There can be such thing as too much information if said information is not pertinent or redundant. A marketing team should be handling this process, but it's always good to have checks and balances.

Make sure all contact info is standardized in a common format so that this data can be used on multiple databases or spreadsheets.

• Check all contact info to make sure it is still current.
• Update missing address info or ones that need to be changed.
• Verify that your subscribers are able to opt out of any email lists.
• Run a search for duplicate information across your lists.

Automation is only as good as your initial setup and ongoing maintenance. You can alienate and lose customers if your data-driven marketing is based on outdated, incomplete, or incorrect contact info.

3. Shared Work and Automation

The sheer amount of information that clients create each day can be too much for even the most skilled marketing groups to gather. It's even harder to dissect it into useful analytics. Without proper structure and tools to automate data, advertisers won't have the right information required for a data-driven marketing campaign.

Ordinarily, businesses have the overlying problem of incorporating information from their physical retail stores with their clients' online networking profile. This can be solved by executing new integrated systems and automated delivery systems.

Advertisers can then invest less energy collecting and searching through information while spending more time utilizing the data to refine their ICP and targeted marketing campaigns.

4. Build a Winning Team

Your data marketing plan is only as good as its players. You cannot be doing most of the work here, nor should you be trying to micromanage everything. There are specialized tasks involved that require people that are very good with systems and measuring.

This is kind of like hiring a maid to clean your house; it gets the job done, but a professional organizer is the only way you'll win in the long run. Another important factor in building a winning team is to have members that understand multiple aspects of data and marketing. You want your data compartmentalized, not your team.

This makes sharing sales figures, social media trends, and marketing campaigns work fluidly. If you only have individual experts doing individually-driven tasks, then a tug-of-war happens and all that data gets wasted. Ideally, you want salespeople with backgrounds in technology and IT experts who understand marketing.

This is an employer's economy, so take your time and don't settle for the first applicants who can excel in predefined roles.

5. Utilize the Power of Infographics

Infographics are powerful data analysis tools for both marketing teams and internal organization. Being able to visually represent statistics makes for faster, more accurate, and cross-department decisions. This is exactly what you need to succeed in data-driven marketing.

Make sure you mix up the types of charts and graphics used, such as bar, line, and pie charts. Bar charts work best when you don't have a ton of data yet, so the contrasts are more obvious across multiple fields. Line graphs will be your go-to chart to show trends, historical reminders, and trajectories.

Pie charts are good for traditional budgetary decisions or sampling the public. All of these examples are great for compiling information that your target audience will resonate with. Infographics represent transparency and trustworthy data (even though some companies exploit this tendency).

6. Collect Data on Competition

Who said data-driven marketing was just about in-house records? When you're able to gather and utilize mass amounts of data on your own company, you can apply this same strategy to keep tabs on competitors. What are they doing differently that makes them successful (or not)?

Learning why certain companies are able to stay ahead of the curve, predict changes in the market, and capitalize on trends is powerful. You don't need to steal ideas or follow the steps of your competition — analytics will tell you your story.

7. Craft a Persona

If you're planning on going into data marketing with a cold and calculated approach, you're probably not going to go very far. All of these numbers and statistics will be useless without being able to communicate with your target audience. Once you've nailed down some solid ICP, you should start thinking about how to insert your brand in an authentic way.

Your persona is just how you come off to a certain demographic when executing your marketing strategy. What language or tone do you use when sending out email blasts? How do you take advantage of social media trends without appearing fake or too generic?

Personalized messaging is how all that data and information pays you off.

8. Right Place, Right Time

While gathering all of this useful data, you have to prioritize the most current data. Building a history is of course important, however, missing out on time-sensitive trends can hurt. Think about how often TV shows are trending on Facebook or Twitter.

Those hashtags can be an easy in for capturing social media engagement.

You could coordinate a product launch with an upcoming event and potentially capture a ton of feedback and engagement that would otherwise be too expensive to obtain.

9. Update, Adapt and Optimize

Data and marketing rely on the flexibility of information. This is not an operation that you can just gather data, set some goals, and come back a few months later. It needs to be constantly updated to get accurate predictions.

This is where powerful analytical tools and automated processes shine. As long as someone is manning the reigns on gathering and translating all that data, your marketing strategy should always be about adjustments. This is why traditional marketing experts come up short, as they just stick to the old marketing techniques and maximizing ROI in the advertising budget.

Complacency and stagnant marketing is a contributing factor to keeping great companies from ever reaching their full potential. You can have a superior product and brand, but if you cannot reach the widest audience, you'll stay in a meteoric rise.

10. Stick to Your Guns

Shaking up your entire marketing strategy isn't going to be a smooth ride. There may be bumps ahead, but it is important to stick to the plan. Your entire team must be committed to the goal of data-driven decision-making.

This means that you can't denote your database and analytics to a secondary team or just supplementary roles.

For our preferred data driven marketing automation software product review, take a look at:
Ontraport Review: Pricing, Features, and More

Start your Data Driven Marketing

As you can see, there is a lot that goes into this realm of data driven marketing. There is no denying that the future is paved in powerful database management and smart, predictive marketing. No longer are sales dictated by only advertising budgets and access to high places.

You probably won't go viral and you probably won't take over your niche overnight, but you will become a better company, no matter what sales you get. Data marketers have the ability to reduce marketing budgets, increase visibility, and increase return on investment through proper data management. Trends can be predicted and customer behavior, especially.

All it takes is smart planning and that starts with the strategic use of customer data and statistics gathered from the world wide web.

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