Become a Data-Driven Marketer
Adopting data-driven marketing strategies allows marketers to optimize a marketing campaign based on campaign interactions, customer behavior, or sales data. Using data allows marketers to fine-tune initiatives, resulting in higher revenue at a lower cost.
Data-driven marketing differs from traditional marketing in its uses of data to understand and align with the customer’s expressed behaviors. With this alignment, marketers can reach potential or current customers with more targeted, personalized advertisements.
Why is data-driven marketing important?
Data-driven marketing matters for three main reasons:
- Allows marketing organizations to make better decisions grounded in data.
- Aligns marketing activities with company goals. Marketers can analyze their data from a goals perspective. Data-driven strategies result in higher profit margins and faster customer acquisition cost payback.
- Allows marketers to get closer to the customer. Leveraging a data-driven approach informs more tailored or personalized communications that align with the customer journey.
Data-driven strategies have many benefits, but don’t take our word for it. As Google says, “Nearly 2/3 of leading marketers say that decisions made with data are superior to those based on gut instinct.” Furthermore, McKinsey reported several case studies showing a 10-25% lift in sales following the implementation of data-driven marketing strategies.
Obstacles to implementing data-driven marketing strategies
Today, 73.5% of leading companies practice data driven decision making. If your organization is not already data driven, you may encounter a few obstacles when implementing this new approach.
The first and most significant obstacle will be the availability and status of your data. The path isn’t entirely smooth, even if you are a data-driven organization. The challenges you will need to overcome may range from the amount of data you have to where to get started.
That said, here are a few of the most common obstacles in implementing a data-driven marketing strategy:
- Poor data: According to IBM, poor-quality data costs a business around $10M annually.
- Data silos: 89% of IT leaders view data silos as one of the leading obstacles to digital transformation.
- Lack of strategy: 35% of survey respondents said that “lack of strategy” prevented them from being data driven.
- Data Quality: Roughly 15% of respondents said that “dirty data” prevented them from being data-driven.
How can you become data-driven?
Becoming data-driven is more accessible than some may believe.
- Start gathering and cleaning data: Gathering and cleaning data first starts with marketing automation tools and customer relationship management tools. These tools can help you begin structuring your data for better organization and visualization. Once you can visualize your data, you’re on your way to becoming data-driven.
- Leverage AI and machine learning: As your database grows, the need to deploy AI and machine learning will take center stage. Humans weren’t built to analyze millions of rows of data and derive actionable conclusions. This is where AI excels.
Implementing AI analytics will allow you to uncover trends and patterns in your data that are too complex for manual analysis. Machine learning will allow your system to gain accuracy over time, generating better results and more actionable insights. - Invest in predictive analytics: Predictive analytics is starting to become a standard toolkit for marketers looking to be data driven. Predictive analytics can create a data roadmap that drives business results and maximizes the usage of your data. AI analytics can generate predictions that can improve conversion rate modeling, detect customer churn, boost retention, and predict customer lifetime value.
If you’re looking to get started in predictive analytics, we created a helpful guide. The guide leads you and other stakeholders through gathering information and making decisions about your data-driven strategy.
If you are interested in how Pecan AI can support your business, feel free to contact us or schedule a demo.