In the past, marketing was often as simple as casting a wide net and hoping you caught some fish. You put your ads out there and aimed for a wide audience. Companies often had little idea of who was buying their product and which areas of their marketing were working.
That’s changed significantly, thanks to the onset of data-driven marketing. Today, the most effective companies use granular targeting to analyze their sales and create ad campaigns targeting their most likely customers. Here’s how to make this new form of marketing work for you and create a more effective marketing strategy.
Main Components of a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
Knowing the Right Data
Many companies start off on the wrong foot with data-driven marketing by looking at the wrong data. For instance, sales alone may not tell the whole story if they change drastically by the season. You may need multiple years’ worth of sales to identify a pattern. Additionally, you might not get the full picture of a sales pattern if you’re not breaking the numbers down by various demographics.
Understanding User Intent
This is an especially important factor when you consider that most sales are done online now – entirely, in some cases. If you run a digital marketplace, it’s critical to understand what your customers are coming to your website to do and if they’re achieving that goal. Many businesses are undone by a confusing website interface, which can massively skew your results when it comes to marketing success.
On-Point Keyword Strategy
Are you using your keywords effectively? These are the key to increasing your company’s awareness through search engines. You want a keyword that will help you stand out from the crowd and not pit you against the biggest guns in your field, but one that’s still popular enough to generate significant traffic.
To find the right keyword, you’ll want to take advantage of digital tools that let you research your competitors. With platforms like Ahrefs Tool Guide: Keyword Explorer for e-commerce, you’ll be able to dig into the performances of specific keywords across the web.
Competitive Analysis
You can’t know where you’re going until you understand who’s already been there and where they succeeded and failed. Before launching a new marketing strategy, ensure you’ve identified your biggest competitors in the space and explored their marketing strategies. You might find things you want to copy with slight tweaks – or you might find a massive missed opportunity in the marketing space that you can take advantage of.
3 Easy Steps To Get Started
Data Collection and Analysis
You’ll want to have a good CRM, or customer relationship management suite to collect data on your sales and customer interaction before you launch your campaign. This is key to understanding your company’s strong suits. Another great source of data is Google Analytics, as you’ll likely be getting a good amount of your traffic from the powerful search engine. Before launching your campaign, make sure to spend time filtering through these data sources before you have a full picture of your core customer base and how to reach them best.
Creating an Integrated Marketing Strategy
Before you launch, it’s important to not just know who you’re trying to appeal to but what qualifies as success. What sales benchmarks are you trying to reach? What customer demographics do you want to see growth in? These are your KPIs, or key performance indicators, and they’ll help you keep track of your campaign’s success as it launches and identify opportunities for more growth.
Tracking Campaign Performance
As your campaign starts and grows, you’ll find new KPIs you want to track. These include customer satisfaction as your sales increase, return on investment, customer acquisition based on site and demographic, and brand awareness and market share growth. Keeping track of your web traffic and where it comes from is especially important, as you’ll quickly be able to see which parts of your marketing strategy are paying dividends – and have time to refine the areas that aren’t connecting yet.
A Successful Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
Contrary to what many believe, the process of building a marketing strategy doesn’t end when the ads roll out the door. In many ways, it just begins – you’ll refine your strategy and strengthen it with each new piece of data that rolls in. This opens up new opportunities and demographics to strengthen your company’s market position.