How to switch to data-driven marketing?

In today’s competitive and data-driven market, you will not get away with making decisions based on your gut feeling anymore. Data-driven marketing is the foundation for creating new go to market strategies and is essential for delivering the personalised experiences customers demand. 

But how do you switch to data-driven marketing and how will it benefit your organisation?  Let’s take a look.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing refers to marketing activities based on data that gives accurate insights by analysing a company’s data or that of its market. Marketers translate these insights into actionable decisions. The goal of data-driven marketing is to optimise marketing processes and strategies to supply the unique demands of their audience and customers. By leveraging the available data these marketers can gain deeper insights into what their customers need and tailor to those needs.

Marketing without the data to back up your efforts is like shooting without taking aim. This approach of just waiting to see who’ll respond to your marketing is outdated. More importantly, with the available technologies, it is unnecessary. 

Data-driven marketing gives companies insight into the who, what, where, when and why their audience and customers engage with their marketing output. It gives you the opportunity to make better decisions on the timing and medium of your marketing and get the most out of your marketing investments.

The advantages of data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing provides you with concrete insight into how well (or not) your marketing efforts are faring. These are the most important advantages of data-driven marketing:

1. It gives you reliable and quick insights into your marketing performance, what works and what doesn’t. This allows you to adopt an experimental marketing process in which you constantly optimise your efforts and adapt your strategy as circumstances change. 
2. It gives you near real-time insight into every person who visits your website or (online) platform. Analytic tools then allow you to analyse your users habits as they interact with your online presence, creating and expanding ideal customer profiles and influencing decisions on building out your online presence.
3. And it allows you to provide clarity on the complexity of the marketing process. With data-driven marketing you can create clear, attractive graphs and charts that communicate valuable marketing information to internal and external stakeholders in a neat, clear and powerful way.

How do you switch to data-driven marketing?

Without the use of data, your marketing efforts are not as efficient or successful as they could be. But how do you switch to data-driven marketing?

1. Identify your goals

First you have to identify your goals. You can’t define the success of your marketing campaigns without goals. Data from previous campaigns can help you set the goals for new ones. It can show you your potential reach, but also the areas that could be improved. 

A good way of setting goals is ‘SMART’: specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound.

2. Identify your target audience

Who do you need to reach to obtain the goals in the first step? This is your target audience. Pay extra attention to their demographics, behaviours and motivations, because this will help you create a better image of this group.

3. Line up the right data

Data-driven marketing campaigns can only perform well when they work with relevant and accurate data. To get this data, you can start by collecting data from previous clients or customers, such as:

• Sales data: what service or product sells the most?
• Customer service history: what type of customers or products generate the most service requests?
• Browsing and clicking behaviour data from your website
• Customer survey data

4. Personalise your marketing

Next you need to decide what channels you want to leverage for your marketing campaigns. For example: social media, your blog, PPC ads, email, etc. The best way of finding out where you should do your campaign is your target audience’s behaviours. 

Go where your customers are and serve them appropriate content. Analyse what content your target audience engages with and in what step of the customer journey they are willing to convert.

5. Track your campaigns

For a successful data-driven marketing campaign, you need to continuously gather data. As your campaign goes on, you can use the metrics that align with your goals to track the progress of its success. Continually monitor and refine your campaign as it goes. Over time, your marketing team and efforts will function like a well oiled machine, whilst continuously improving.

So what is holding companies back from switching to data-driven marketing?

The 5 steps described above get you a long way towards data-driven marketing. But still, many companies today run their marketing efforts mainly on gut feeling, or on fragmented pieces of data and not on a complete overview of their audience and customers. Why is that?

The answer is in what we call the data engineering challenge. 

Most successful marketers are business savvy, strong analytical thinkers and very empathetic towards their audience and customers wants and needs. But in order to collect data from different sources where it is collected, then store it somewhere scalable and accessible and model it so it becomes usable for data analytics or science tools, you need fluent skills in tools and frameworks like coding in Python, writing queries in SQL and database management. Most marketers do not, nor should they want to, possess these skills. So there is a gap, which is often solved by many hours of manual work in csv’s and excel files that leads to wasted time and unreliable data.This data engineering challenge still prevents many organisations from driving true value from their data and being able to innovate and scale their data initiatives.

How can Eyk help?

Eyk lets you connect your cloud applications, automatically extracts the data and sets up a cloud data warehouse with your provider of choice. It then manages and optimises that warehouse, so you can store and curate all your data for today's business challenges and future innovations.

On top of that, the Eyk data platform also transforms your data through pre-built data models and even joins different sources to each other if you want, so you can easily make the connections you need between different data points. This gives you the ability to relate your customer data from sources like Google Analytics and your CRM system to the actual financial results logged in your accounting software and combine it into one trusted marketing funnel.

With Eyk, all organisations, regardless of engineering resources and skills, are able to set up a data platform, develop a data culture and innovate with their data.

Want to know more?

Do you want to make the most of your organisation’s marketing and switch to data-driven marketing? 

Register for a free trial or get in touch with our sales team. We will happily look at your company’s specific needs and goals, and answer any questions you might have.

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