A data driven marketing strategy is essential to ensure that your business benefits fully from your marketing efforts. By analysing relevant data, you will be able to see where your marketing is falling short and adjust your approach to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. The five steps outlined below will help you to use data to guide your marketing tactics, so your business can reap the rewards.

Leverage Your Data Team

Prior to conducting any data analysis, it is prudent to build a data handling team. The members of this team ought to come from a range of departments and multidisciplinary teams. This should not mean that somebody from the finance department collaborates with someone from the customer support team, who wants a break from dealing with complaints. It should mean that you identify people who are prepared to expand their knowledge base. Nurture the alliance between these people by arranging regular, targeted meetings, where everybody brainstorms new ideas and gets used to working together productively.

Establish Your Objectives Clearly

Another essential step before commencing the data collection process, is understanding what type of data is valuable. Decide what data categories will benefit your marketing methods in a positive way. Disregard data that is unlikely to make your advertising more effective and concentrate on accumulating data related to Key Performance Indicators that will really impact your business.

Get the Data Collected

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When you have completed your data gathering preparations, you will need a way to store data to facilitate analysis. The data types below are all worth collecting, although this is not an exhaustive list:

• Competition
• Target audience
• Qualitative data
• Information about customers (including transactional details, personal profile, and activity on social networks and the Internet)
• Information about prospects (the same details as above)
• Social media and marketing analytics (including impressions, click through rates and conversions)

Remember that data might be hidden away in some less obvious areas of your business – maybe with your sales team, with resellers or with dealers of your service or product. After you have looked at the data, you will be able to identify and review the customer lifecycle. This could include details like service calls or complaints, point of sale issues and purchases related to positive online reviews.

Analyze the Data Then Implement Appropriate Measures

Once the data has been analyzed against your Key Performance Indicators, you can begin to use that information to guide your marketing strategy:

1) Tweak Your Approach to Content Marketing: Perhaps you have used content marketing to appeal to your target demographic. However, your strategy might not be clearly defined with regards to content creation or who you are attempting to reach. After gathering the data, you will have a much better idea of who your audience is and what they like.

Try creating a range of different content, such as videos, images and articles. If you publish content regularly, this part should be straightforward. Remember that engagement is the key objective. By giving your audience what it wants, you increase the likelihood that your content will be shared. This might require a bit of testing to get right, but the data you have obtained should guide you in this respect.

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2) Broaden Your Horizons: You could opt to target your services or products at a different group of consumers, based on the new data you have. This need not involve changing your brand entirely; but rather simply adjusting the focus of your advertising. The ultimate objective is to search for gaps in the market and identify new types of customers, who can benefit from your outstanding services/products.

3) Eliminate Obstacles: You will be able to identify the obstacles faced by your prospective customers, throughout the sales process, by examining your data. Then, you need to determine how to rectify those problems. Do lots of customers seem to abandon their shopping carts? Use the data to identify any aspects of your business that is preventing customers from making a purchase and implement changes immediately.

4) Consider Different Advertising Platforms

Is your brand failing to reach all of its’ target audience? If you only have a website to promote your services or products, your business will struggle to get noticed. Make use of your data to find other promotional outlets. You could try collaborating with companies that sell unrelated products to yours, or set up a reward scheme where loyal customers tell their friends about your services, in return for special deals. Thorough data analysis will reveal the right method for your situation.

Keep Experimenting on a Regular Basis

Although data is useful when devising a new advertising campaign, it should be regularly tested and manipulated. Conducting small trials on your marketing efforts each day, in a scientific manner, allows you to gain valuable insights into what is working and what isn’t. The data you gather from doing this will make your advertising more impactful.

Data Legislation

Marketers who process and store the personal details of EU citizens need to ensure that GDPR regulations are observed. The GDPR was introduced by European authorities in May 2018, to protect the personal information of consumers. Businesses should protect themselves from security breaches, by incorporating safeguards into every stage of the data sharing process. When getting rid of data, marketers should adhere to recommended industry practices. Mobile shredding machines can be used to destroy data on-site. For off-site data destruction, it is important to ship any boxed materials or small quantities of media securely. Once you have destroyed your data, you need a data erasure certificate for every hard drive and video evidence that each data storing device has been destroyed.

Final Thoughts

You can never know enough about your customers, but by formulating data driven marketing strategies, you can better understand their changing desires and needs. With data driven insights, your efforts will be focused on accomplishing your goals and improving customer experiences. 

Author Bio:

This article was written by Peter Desmond, Marketing Manager for Wisetek, who are global leaders in IT Asset Disposition, Data Destruction & IT Reuse.