A data-driven approach drives customer activity.
Let me ask you a question that many brands and advertisers surprisingly get wrong:
What comes first: the why, or the what?
If you look at many successful brands like Nike and Apple, we know that they are the most widely recognized for their products, but could argue that other brands like Reebok or Dell have products that are as/more effective in some cases.
So why do we tend towards the previous two brands, and recognize them as the best?
Simon Sinek says it best: the best advertising and brand marketing comes from effectively communicating values and beliefs from the inside-out, as opposed to the features or a product or service first.
In terms of consumer behaviour, customers act based on how a service/product will benefit their quality of life, vs. how much RAM it has, horsepower, etc.
And what, do you ask, is the best approach for tracking customer behaviour based on this belief system to improve your marketing tactics?
Driven. Data, driven.
Data-Driven Marketing
is rooted in the idea of using data analytics to drive marketing decisions based on customer behavior, but also to predict customer behaviour in future to help maximize marketing efforts where they matter.
Whether this data comes from CRM + ERP systems, Google Analytics, online surveys, social analytics, or any other metrics system – this data is quantified and examined from a statistical perspective and linked to customer decisions to predict trends.
Key Point: Data can be pretty damn overwhelming, especially when data comes from so many internal and external sources. Depending on your service/product provided and overall marketing goals, the types of relevant data will vary.
For example, Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics would likely be more important to a Social Media Marketing firm as opposed to data from CRM/ERP systems.
Big data is a big world, ladies and gents.
Consumer-Centric Marketing
Back to the people who matter: your customers.
Monetate estimates that 3/4 consumers would prefer if retailers gathered and siphoned through data in order to create a more seamless, personalized shopping experience.
In Adobe’s “Smart Moves for Data-Driven Marketing” guide, they break down three essential steps towards analyzing big-data for better marketing decisions:
- Step 1 – Integrate data sources to create one customer profile across all channels.
- Step 2 – Create targeted experiences based on a holistic view of each customer.
- Step 3 – Have one-to-one conversations throughout the customer journey.
Other than integrating the data that your business needs and analyzing it, the next step is using this data to alter parts of the customer experience based on their behavior and views.
As a consumer-centric marketing approach, data-driven marketing helps to predict customer lifetime value and profitability based upon your services.
With the right steps, data-driven marketing can help your business to move beyond simple transactional offers and enable you to cross-sell more effectively, deploy cross-channel offers and more to maximize your marketing efforts and connect more with customers for a more personalized relationship.
So, do you rule your marketing data, or does it rule you? Implement this approach today to find out.
