If 61% of customers feel that brands don’t know them as well as they should, as a recent report from Acquia suggests, then how do you ensure that you are not just consistently meeting the needs of your audience but understanding them? While consumers will abandon brands if they feel that brand isn’t meeting their expectations, over 70% of customers say they’re more inclined to be loyal to brands that understand them, so it’s never been more important to attain and keep the loyalty of your customer base. Which is where data-driven marketing can help.
What exactly is data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing looks at collected data which can be analysed to create campaigns revolving around what the customer wants and needs, rather than what you think the customer wants and needs. By looking at the data you can make sure that your marketing is compelling and relevant to the people that you’re trying to target, meaning that you can connect with your customer on an individual level.
Why use data-driven marketing?
Today’s consumer is constantly and instantaneously connected through social media and it’s important to break through the clutter of options, opinions and the general cacophony held within a modern smartphone, data-driven marketing can help you work out where your customer spends their time online. This means you now know where a campaign will have the most impact, and where you are most likely to convert clicks into sales.
Social media can give you major insights into customers and help you, as a business, make informed decisions about what’s working and what isn’t. You can use data to keep campaigns moving forward and give your marketing strategy direction. Being able to reasonably predict how your customers will react to certain campaigns helps to create long-lasting relationships between your customer base and your brand.
Data and creativity – where do they meet?
All of this focus on data can lead to creativity being left by the wayside, but data can only ever be an effective tool when used properly, and that means harnessing your creativity to use data in a way that suits you and your customer.
Here’s a few tips to show how you can use data to fuel your creativity!
Retargeting
The marketing equivalent of a good friend, retargeting sees you’re interested in one thing and infers you may like something similar. If someone’s recently looked into backpacking, then you could automatically offer them deals on accommodation, cheap travel or similar holiday options that might appeal to them. Data can help you learn what your customer wants and gives you the tools you need to craft a creative campaign that is informed by the data not run by it.
Dynamic advertising
Dynamic advertising sets you up with your perfect customer, the content that they like and dislike lets you put the optimal product in front of them. The data collected means you can interpret what content will be relevant for your individual customer and lets you create ads targeted at that person. By personalizing your relationship with the customer, you make it way more likely they’ll come back to you again.
Optimised paid search
By looking at the keywords your targeted customers search for and by looking at competitors, you can position yourself at the top of the relevant search results. From there you can drive traffic to your website. But choosing the right keywords is an art in and of itself, picking the ones what works for you and your customer is an opportunity to use your creativity to get the best results possible.
Targeted email campaigns
This one works if you already use email as a part of an existing strategy. By grouping your audience together, you can easily personalise emails to make individual connections, while simultaneously keeping in contact with your whole customer database.
There are those worried that data-driven marketing will replace marketers, but it’s reliant on you digging down into the trends and working out what your customers want. Data-driven marketing only works when you supply the creativity to use it in the best way, but when it works it can help you achieve almost anything (maybe not world peace, but you could give it a go!)
If you’d like to talk to a specialist today about your online marketing, contact us today for a chat.