Data-Driven Marketing Initiatives Are Crucial To Survive And Thrive In Modern Business Terrains. Here Is Our Complete Business Development Guide To Ensure Growth-Oriented Decision Making!
The modern marketing paradigm shift has revolutionized businesses’ ability to locate, identify and understand their consumers. This means today, there is zero excuse for not knowing what your customers want.
More Data-Driven Marketing-Related Content from HVMA:
► Data-Powered Strategy to Drive Ecommerce Conversions
► How Marketing Analytics Can Keep Your Fitness Business in Shape!
► Using Identity Resolution To Create A 360-Degree View Of Your Customers
► Omnichannel Marketing – The Ultimate Marketing Pathway
*Connect with us on LinkedIn HVMA Marketing LinkedIn Profile
NEED HELP USING THE DATA FROM YOUR CHANNELS TO GENERATE MORE REVENUE AND HIGHER CONVERSIONS?
TRY OUR PROFESSIONAL B2B DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING
A variety of tools are available for marketers to capture and analyze deeply saturated ranges of data within their marketing funnels. Ultimately, this feeds into their decision-making abilities. As such, the days of widely-cast nets of untargeted marketing are gone—and with it, a new era of digitally-driven, informationally-bound marketing strategies ushered in.
The data-driven approach operates at a capacity robust enough to focus on the bigger picture while remaining attentive to individual customers on a case-by-case basis. This provides the ability to understand and deal with customers wherever they are within the business’s viewfinder. This also means firms can track, engage and maintain a consistent, real-time overview of their customers’ needs and activities.
Whether you contact them through email, text, phone, in person or through their social handles, your customers receive the same information and undergoes the same cohesive experience. The best part? You can automate these processes to absorb and analyze the data that customers leave behind. Once your team has collected and analyzed this data, they can procure insights to fuel a robust omnichannel marketing strategy. This involves creating personalized content relevant to the user experience and reaching target audiences through organic reach or paid advertising. Ultimately, you’ll even be able to predict your audiences’ desires and needs…perhaps even before they know themselves.
So, how does such a system work? How is this relevant for you as a business owner or as marketing leadership? Finally, what are the steps involved in adopting it for your own organization? Follow along with HVMA’s business development guide as we help you boost your organization’s understanding of data-driven decision-making, personalization marketing and understanding who your customer is and what your customer wants!
Data Driven Approach – The Basics to Success
Data driven marketing, as a tenet within widely accepted modern advertising practices, is considered necessary for business survival. As it is, businesses struggle to locate and identify their target audience.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you knew where your consumers are lingering online, their lifestyles and preferences, or the best audience profile they fit into?
This knowledge could break the glass ceiling and help to initiate a warm connection with potential customers. However, before you can know the correct audiences to pitch your product or service to, it’s crucial to understand the categories that exist and who they include.
HVMA Tip:
Online behaviors, shopping habits, and personal preferences are examples of crucial analytics to assess.
Curating metrics detailing browsing patterns, social media activity and triggered CTAs (call-to-actions) can focus your team’s efforts on what works. Eventually, by combining meaningful messaging with the data collected, your organization can identify the most efficient ways to gain their trust and commitment.
Understanding And Connecting With Your Ideal Customers – Personalization
The next step in our business development guide relies on creating a personalized experience for each consumer entering your brand’s marketing funnel.
Personalization has become the modern marketing mantra. This means providing conversions and return customers the best in experience quality and delivering a standard of service which makes them feel as special as the next person over.
HVMA Tip:
Doesn’t it strike a certain chord within when you receive a carefully-crafted email marketing promotion with your name, products you’ve been searching for, and a 20% off coupon to boot? That’s the mark of a well-constructed email marketing campaign!
Remember—no great marketing campaign (or business development, for that matter) ever happened without goals. Before engaging with your customers, it’s important to know how to even locate your audience, where to engage with them and why they may respond accordingly.
Ask yourself questions such as:
- What is the purpose for my ad campaigns?
- What reaction/CTA am I trying to elicit?
- Does my audience engage more on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.?
- What if I was the customer…what kind of offer would grab my attention?
- How can I keep my product or service relevant to each individual consumer?
By using data from previous campaigns or by using development tools within platforms such as Facebook Analytics or YouTube Advertising, you establish baseline measurements for the new campaign.
This data will highlight your high-performance results as well as areas needing improvement, giving you clarity regarding the effectiveness and reach of your marketing efforts. After gathering and analyzing data from the outlets your brand is active on, you can build powerful oversight for which digital channels are most conducive for reaching your customers, and which require the most work.
Deliver Relevant, Personalized Messages Through Audience Segmentation
It’s important to include buyer segmentation or audience profiling as a stage within the overall business development strategy.
Categorizing your consumers’ tastes, habits and demographic information will save you endless hours and vast quantities of ad spend in wasted “pray-and-spray” marketing attempts. If you already know what your customer wants, how they think and the way they prefer things, you can provide them with a virtually seamless shopping experience while eliminating cluttered content, reducing wasted budget and maintaining your brand’s impeccable reputation for quality customer service!
Data can identify which specific content is attracting prospects into your funnel or uncovering the content that doesn’t deserve your time and budget spend. No two ads are the same, and neither are any two customers—therefore, it’s essential to maintain diversity.
You cannot deliver the same, cookie-cutter messaging nor employ the same tactics toward every prospective target audience or return customer. Each one is at a unique stage within their buyer journey and, respectively, each deserves their own content specifically tailor-made for their situation. Otherwise, it entirely defeats the purpose of data-driven decision-making in the first place!
HVMA Tip:
One person, for instance, might have just happened upon your brand and, while interested, has no idea what you’re selling just yet. Another person, however, may already be intent on committing to purchase, but doesn’t know which tier of service they need. How can you provide each consumer a relevant message which effectively uncovers their individual needs, addresses the problem, and delivers them a solution—your solution—while securing their trust and ultimately, the conversion?
The answer lies in the data! By tracking the historical data created from each potential customer and analyzing their behaviors/patterns for predictable tendencies, your marketing team can ascertain their needs well ahead of time, and incorporate strategies or templates to cater to each unique situation.
- Give the new consumer an email marketing newsletter which subconsciously grabs their attention. Use diction which is relevant to them and tackles their apparent issue with your product or service. Build a story which is meaningful yet attractive and engage them with some sort of direct benefit or growth to look forward to—ending with a CTA of a free trial or complimentary analysis.
- For the person familiar with your brand but doesn’t know whether they want to purchase or what items/service they need, create follow-up ad campaigns on Facebook Ads. Include an infographic which subtly refreshes them with your brand (perhaps with a discount code) and provide a clickthrough link to jump them to your landing page where they can revisit their cart and, hopefully, purchase.
Optimize Your Channels—Improve The User Experience
It’s important to remember that not all content channels are created equal.
Leads generated from Facebook respond differently to leads procured through email marketing, who respond differently from leads found through your website’s CTA (call-to-action). This explains why marketers must research and implement their strategies according to the channel being engaged on, as well as which leads are engaging on said channels.
HVMA Tip:
Data-driven approaches allow business owners to identify channels which outperform others in terms of reach or conversions. This includes the particulars surrounding content types and how those tiny variables may affect audiences’ response to these messages.
Nevertheless, it’s crucial to include what is known as an omnichannel marketing approach to your overall advertising infrastructure. This subsection of our business development guide focuses on incorporating a holistic overview of your brand from multiple angles.
NOTE: No matter where your consumer is located within your company’s digital (or retail) bubble, your firm must cohesively unify a given communication across and throughout its functional teams, so the overall message remains the same.
A poorly constructed omnichannel marketing approach may take the form of: a customer receiving an offer in an email, using the offer, and then receiving the same offer the next day.
In another instance of siloed communication: a customer receives a late fee notice through their inbox, call a customer service representative to request a refund and cancel, and then receives yet another charge the following week. Quite frustrating, and counterintuitive to any intelligent marketing strategy!
Thus, your ability to leverage complex, emotional content to evoke certain user behaviors must evolve past the scope of individual channel functionality altogether.
By operating transparently on multiple platforms, one can refine their target audience and consolidate their campaign to be as efficient as possible. At this point, your users will reciprocate their appreciation through increased engagement and higher relevancy because your marketing message directly fulfills their needs! Witness your channels flourish as likes, shares and impressions flood in from all avenues.
The Importance Of Automating The Journey
It’s pretty easy to get bogged down by the vast quantities of data pouring in through your various channels, especially if they’re all working in unison. How can your marketing team combat the overwhelming amount of information flooding your company’s servers while remaining efficient, and make sense of all this data? After all, much of it is actually quite useless…but how would your team know that without mechanically parsing through every single piece of information? The HVMA business development guide method heavily emphasizes a powerful new marketing method: automation!
Investing in marketing automation doesn’t necessarily require the reduction of manpower within the overall marketing engine. In fact, as ISG-One found in their research study, automation is not replacing jobs—over 66% of respondents found that automation initiatives are primarily focused on tackling specific tasks within the overall business process.
Software robots are taught to transfer data from one enterprise system to another, or to fill cumbersome invoice transactions for a warehouse. Within data-driven marketing schemes, this manifests as:
- Collecting and parsing the massive amounts of data flowing in and around your firm
- Disposing of that data, which is useless, irrelevant to personalization or unnecessary in the overall omnichannel approach
- Eliciting intelligent machine learning to analyze and categorize data into targeting profiles.
- Using CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software suites to automatically manage and fulfill email marketing campaigns.
Rather than dulling down your data,implement technology solutions to do the heavy lifting in collecting and extrapolating the data ebbing from your customers.
Gain insight into whether your content is working and eliciting responses, and why they may be responding in kind to your messaging. After all, in such a dynamic and fast-paced world as data-driven business, moving rapidly and maintaining quick responsiveness is mandatory to avoid the traps of disinformation and siloed communication.
Optimizing Your Channels’ Content to Improve User Experience
Another major facet to consider within your business’s marketing strategy involves which types of content are most suitable for any given channel or marketing platform. In order to provide user audiences with the most compatible experience for them, you must refine the content being posted to remain instrumental in capturing and maintaining your customers’ attention. Taking it a step further, the content must elicit emotional responses through meaningful messaging which resonates with your buyers on a personal level. Otherwise, they’ll give little thought or attention to another rambling, ambiguous ad copy which only seems to be occupying their news feed or timeline. They may not even realize the solution to their needs is sitting in front of them within your company’s ad—they’re too busy ignoring it!
HVMA Tip:
- Take the landing page of your website, for example. Most companies using data-driven approaches create specifically targeted landing pages which match the branding elements and aesthetic of their email marketing campaign and social channels. So, when a 20% off coupon is delivered directly to a delighted customer’s inbox, they know the customer will follow through into the marketing funnel and hopefully convert. Meanwhile, the business exec knows her ad is working because it’s written around her customers’ data—which she’s used to her advantage in constructing copy relevant to each consumer viewing the content.
- Consider email marketing campaigns, in another instance. Email marketing has remained a time-tested, invaluable method for creating effective marketing campaigns that are sure to reach their intended audience. However, if an email is irrelevant, seems impersonal or spammy even, it will be ignored or even sent to the trash. The intelligent marketer knows that in the modern environment, curating personalized, meaningful messages that grab attention in a genuine manner are the move. Focusing on traditional sales techniques such as:
- urgency or deals
- time-bound offers
- pain points
- FOMO or
- the product/service’s direct benefits
are all powerful strategies for connecting with your audience. Also ensure to build a quick and easily accessible CTA button to transfer customers to your landing page and into your marketing funnel. Once you’ve locked a consumer in, it’s smooth sailing as the data does its job indefinitely.
More Data-Driven Marketing-Related Content from HVMA:
► Data-Powered Strategy to Drive Ecommerce Conversions
► How Marketing Analytics Can Keep Your Fitness Business in Shape!
► Using Identity Resolution To Create A 360-Degree View Of Your Customers
► Omnichannel Marketing – The Ultimate Marketing Pathway
*Connect with us on LinkedIn HVMA Marketing LinkedIn Profile
NEED HELP USING THE DATA FROM YOUR CHANNELS TO GENERATE MORE REVENUE AND HIGHER CONVERSIONS?
TRY OUR PROFESSIONAL B2B DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING
Social Media Within Your Omnichannel Strategy
A final important piece within our business development guide’s content puzzle points to one of the most accessible ways to connect with audiences—social media. More importantly, the types of content posted within your social platforms.
Facebook has emerged as a primary source of ad targeting campaigns for most companies. More specifically, video seems to procure the most engagements, likes, views and shares on the platform and remains a staple content type. Behind the content, however, businesses utilize native plugins and features such as Facebook Pixel, YouTube Analytics or Instagram Ads Manager to build an all-encompassing advertising machine that automates and performs seamlessly in the background.
No longer must firms blindly pitch ads or commercials to unidentifiable consumers—now, they can track and learn about their customers and remain ahead of the curve. Where a customer may be hesitant to commit to a brand, the marketing team can learn what decision points affected the customer’s ultimate choice, pinpoint the structural error and fix it. So if customers bounce from your Facebook Page because of missing links or a CTA box which doesn’t function correctly, you’ll know before you lose more sales conversions and, ultimately, more revenue.
Strategic Advertising – Targeting, Retargeting and Predicting The Future
If you can deliver the best user experience which is relevant to customers every single time, you avoid issues with with product/service delivery, customer service quality or even attending to consumers’ needs in a timely way. Why? You already knew what they wanted, perhaps, even before they did.
Our business development guide focuses on recycling or retargeting the hard work you’ve put into gathering your precious data stocks by replenishing them through replication. This would mean a self-sustained and virtually limitless reservoir of user data to feed your servers, real-time. Your team would be constantly updated with insights, as well as repeated batches of new customers to pull from.
So, how does retargeting work?
At this point, the data-driven marketing plan demands less from you and your team and more from the automation systems you’ve put in place. After parsing through the consumer engagement data, your marketing engine can interpret, identify and target the same consumers—this time, within a category that they fit into.
By targeting, segmenting, and retargeting audiences with the same approaches which are designed to work—as the historical data proves it—there is almost no denying the conversion of those customers into repeat customers…loyal brand ambassadors for your firm! Facebook’s native mechanics within its Ad Targeting structure, for example, actually figures out the best audience pools to target based off data-driven analysis initially, and later develops its own “lookalike audiences” to reuse time and time again.
As you can see, data-driven decision-making has risen to the top of the modern marketing food chain. Above all other practices, over 88% of marketing respondents use third parties to extract big data for marketing, and just over two-thirds believe speed and accuracy are direct benefits of data-driven marketing. It’s a no-brainer to include this diverse, robust approach to advertising and lead generation within your business’s infrastructure…so why wait?
Reach out to us at HVMA Marketing today to discover how we can help your brand or organization grow.
We help companies achieve higher profit margins, and larger ROIs and gain them an unprecedented level of efficiency.
If you don’t believe us, don’t worry—we’ve got the data to prove it!
Did you enjoy this business development guide? Share it with others
