Technology has opened up a lot of new avenues for businesses to reach their target customers and market their products. Technology and data are the major driving factors of modern day marketing. However, honing the art of data driven marketing is not really a simple task. While most marketers do realize the importance of leveraging data, many are struggling to make most of it. Data remains one of the most under used marketing asset of an organization.
Here is a list of important aspects you have to concentrate on while designing a data – driven marketing strategy:
Strategic Planning
Data is the biggest asset to develop actionable business intelligence. All the departments of the organization should be involved ensuring the quality of data and documenting the required data points. Ensure that you set a business vision encompassing the activities of all the departments of your organization. Understand the flow of data within the organization. Ensure you list down all your customer touch points, how customers interact with your business using different mediums and how the customer data is exchanged during the sale process. Define the KPIs which translate your business vision along all these various touch points. Include the strategies to collect the data at various points.
Know the Data You Need
There are a wide array of tools to track and measure almost all your marketing campaigns. This also means you have loads of data which you need to convert to meaningful insights. The first thing you need to do is to identify the data points which are most important among all the data variables available. You have to understand how to reduce large amounts of data into measurable indicators which provide instant insights. Identifying the right data points plays a major role in helping you to start your data – driven marketing efforts on the right note.
Ensure you have all the required tools to implement the strategy
Once you finalize your strategy on the data you require to track, design an IT strategy to implement the strategy. You IT strategy should not start with choosing appropriate tools to capture the data. Decide on the hardware structure to store the collected data. Address the data integrity issues and have a schema of data hierarchy to determine the views and access to various stake holders. Ensure that your IT stack has all the required strategy documents and hardware support to successfully translate your business vision and provide marketing the necessary means to study the data.
Alerts and Triggers
The major advantage of data driven marketing lies in its almost real time tracking of the customer data. Ensure that you define all the triggers and alerts based on the user behavior. Define and execute strategy to perform a particular strategy depending on the actions executed by the user. Similarly define the required alerts to notify the various stake holders if any abnormalities are observed in user data or user flow. Such alerts and triggers ensure that you are always monitoring the data even without looking at you dashboards 24*7.
The primary goal of data driven marketing is to convert the numbers to meaningful insights and actionable recommendations. It helps you in continually improvise your marketing campaigns. Capturing the meaningful data improvising the marketing campaigns based on the data will lead to maximizing the return on investment and increase customer engagement. The insights provided by the data should be used to continuously improvise your marketing campaigns and ensure you maximize your marketing efforts.
