With the advent of the digital era, which can be considered a double-edged weapon, businesses have faced an increasing complexity within the competitive landscapes. In such a context, firms are required to be more and more dynamic, agile, and to provide solutions almost in real-time, if they aim not only to survive in a hypercompetitive market but to stand out as top performers. Within companies, marketing departments are on the front-line in facing the massive complexity of the competitive landscape. This complexity has been enhanced by several elements, among which the proliferation of the available quantity of information seems to be the most relevant. Underestimating the potential and advantages of data and measurements will certainly be strategically detrimental, and it would threaten your business at its core. Therefore, the central role of information and the impact it has on your competitive advantage has to be reconsidered. It has been proven that the ability to generate and refer to a significant amount of data is extensively advantageous, and it allows your business to have more control over the contextual complexity in the market. Since the availability of in-depth data provides a more detailed and complete picture of your business’ audience, and given the current market’s state urging businesses to shift towards a more customer-centric approach, as a key asset to profitability, it appears that relying on information and data about your customers is the most convenient practice when it comes to making business decisions. The main implication is that companies are required to adopt a more systematic approach to data and analytics, undergoing adjustments concerning their decision-making processes.
Better understanding your customers, by selecting and monitoring the most profitable segment to invest in, secures your business with improvements in the interactions with them, in terms of relevance, time-sensitiveness, and online presence. For your marketing efforts to be effective and efficient, in the digital era, it is necessary to provide highly personalized and tailored content, experiences, and solutions implying that your offering has to be both relevant and contextual to your customers. Data, measurements, and analytics would lead your business and marketing department’s evolution, shifting from the traditional and outdated mass marketing to more refined and tailored marketing efforts, focusing on building long-lasting relationships with your customers, and supporting a customer-centric approach, which is ultimately profitable in shaping your customer journeys and experiences. Given that the main marketing goal is to drive business growth, investing in data-driven marketing approaches has to be considered as a mandatory strategic asset, as it has been demonstrated to be the most supportive way for businesses to gain competitive advantage, addressing customers’ needs and expectations more successfully, and optimizing the whole business’ operations. Furthermore, unique insights about your customers, retrieved and interpreted from your data, can inform, impact and influence decisions across all organization.
Data-driven marketing strategy concerns
Data-driven marketing refers to the set of strategies implemented starting from insights drawn from the analysis of a big amount of data and metrics, collected by combining both structured and unstructured data, mainly through customers’ interactions and engagement, in order to produce informed decisions and predictions about customers’ future needs and expectations. Hence, companies aiming to adopt a customer-centric approach have to heavily rely on this set of strategies and constantly refer to customer data for optimizing and targeting their marketing efforts towards coping with their customer’s perspective, enabling higher degrees of personalization, which will in turn impact over customer journeys and experiences. Implementing data-driven marketing strategies appears to be an operational solution to best orientate and justify all your business decisions, since it also increases the opportunity to profitably interact with your customers, delivering improved experiences, and influencing the relationship with them. In order to your business to become data-driven, assuming that a structured and pragmatic digital strategy has been already settled, four main concerns have to be first taken into account to successfully achieve an approach that could drive value to your organization.
1. When it comes to Infrastructure technologies
The first concern is to consider shaping a clear overall technology infrastructure and vision, that has to complement the data that will support your decision-making processes. There are several platforms and data provider, however, those technologies have to be implemented with a highly structured approach, in order to raw numbers and metrics to be successfully developed and exploited. It is required to manage a big amount of information to discover relevant insights and to generate a complexity-proven infrastructure to design the right contents, products, solutions, and offerings mainly based on your customers’ wants.
2. Considering Integration Data
Secondly, your company has to develop a full integration of both structured and unstructured data (including digital profiles, sentiment analysis, reviews, etc.), in order to have a constant 360° degree view of your customers. By linking different metrics retrieved from several channels, tracking all customer activities, in order to establish patterns and access a wider spectrum of your customers’ perspectives, and by simplifying data’s complexity, your marketing efforts will result to be highly tailored and customer-centric.
3. Don’t forget about Interpretation insights
The third concern is how to cope with the massive amount of available information, which can be solved through methodical data interpretations. It is vital to set goals and priorities when analyzing data, in order to access the most meaningful results. While tracking every metric is necessary, data are required to be translated into valuable insights, that could, in turn, orientate your decision-making processes and drive more value, relying on the ones yielding higher informative potential based on your set of goals.
4. Summing up with Inclusion value driven
To drive value from a solid infrastructure, integrating several data, and interpreting them in the most profitable way, the last concern is to build up a devoted and inclusive team that works cross-functionally within the whole organization. This team should include the right skills holders, namely employees with high analytics and dynamic mindsets and a certain degree of creativity having an overview of the overall strategy. Furthermore, to secure an information alignment, this team would be responsible for the constant availability and accessibility of data, which in turn would be translated into key insights that would support a reliable and straightforward informed decision-making process.
Data-driven marketing benefits
Data-driven marketing represents a crucial asset to your business’s horizon growth since it is mainly directed to improve your customer experiences and journeys, based on their real-time needs. It is demonstrated to boost significantly profitability, marketing ROI, digital sales and to drive growth across channels. Moreover, the amount of highly detailed and fine-grained data grants seven key benefits:
· Higher efficiency: with the support of automated processes, algorithms and focused insights, the decision-process outcomes tend to be more informed and as a result, the media planning and buying are more optimized and efficient;
· Improved targeting: a wide consumer profile outline and target analysis can cast light over the most profitable target to be addressed by your marketing efforts, improving contents, experiences, and journeys;
· Increased personalization: the “one-size-fits-all” approach is highly ineffective in the current digital landscape. Data-driven marketing provides a systematic approach that encompasses a solid framework for tailored and personalized contents.
· Clear-cut clarity: sustained by a wide spectrum of data, it is more feasible to determine the most accurate and reliable information about your customers and their digital habits, outlining aggressive strategies to strike the competition.
· Refined customer experience: data-driven marketing provides numerous opportunities to access in-depth consumer insights that, orchestrated with several assets, secure your customers’ satisfaction, engagement, and ultimately experiences.
· Better product development: constantly tracking and monitoring customers’ attitudes significantly reduce product failures. Data grant you a better understanding of your customer’s expectations, and they can provide valuable assets to anticipate their needs, and consequently test-out products and solution against them.
· Multichannel experience: to optimize reach across channels, data offer the opportunity to monitor and track your customers almost in real-time, analyzing their attitudes and actions during their whole journey. This would ultimately lead your business to deliver consistent and aligned content within all the channels.
In a nutshell, data-driven marketing strategies are undeniably convenient for businesses soughing to take a competitive stand within an increasingly complex landscape. Moreover, considering the necessity of having a unique overview of the strategic approach that could cover a multichannel setting, data-driven marketing highly simplifies the decision-making process. In the next issue, however, we are going to pass through the multichannel perspective, to embrace an emerging trend: the omnichannel approach.