We all know that marketing is a crucial aspect of running a business, but what happens when we lose focus on the best ways to do marketing in the 21st century? The Internet has done more than just change marketing, it has utterly transformed it from an art-from driven by vague notions of the zeitgeist to a ruthless, cutting-edge and data-driven machine.
If you haven’t yet shifted your marketing strategy to be fuelled by the data you’re collecting, then here are some good reasons to make that switch as soon as possible:
1. Meaningful Customer Insights
It’s important to have on demand consumer insights that guide your marketing strategy, and those come from the data. When you really dig down into the data, you can discover things about your customers that may surprise and amaze you. Data is increasingly precise and informative when it comes to learning about customer behaviour.
These insights can tell you both what you’re doing right with your products and services, and more importantly what you’re doing wrong. Knowing, for instance, that your most profitable demographic prefers one of your smaller product lines rather than the flagship line can help you adjust your offerings to better cater to what people want.
2. Create Personalised and Better-Targeted Campaigns
Forget using a one-size-fits-all approach in your marketing, or even a sweeping group of campaigns broadly targeting different audiences, data will convert your marketing campaigns into the equivalent of a cutting-edge laser-guided bomb. When you are armed with the kind of detail and insight that marketing data can provide, your efforts can turn to creating personalised and highly targeted campaigns that can make their recipients feel different to the way mass-generated spam they receive on a daily basis does.
3. Better Audience Segmentation
Being able to properly segment your audience accurately has long been one of the “holy grail” capabilities of marketing teams past and present. Where once we could use the limited data we had to split people into age groups, for example, we now have enough data to segment on much more specific areas.
When you value data-driven marketing, you can break down your audience in just about any way that you need. You can look at age, occupation, location, what products and services they’ve used and how often…the list goes on and on. The more data you can collect and use, the more segmentation can happen and the more laser-precise your marketing becomes.
4. Marshall Marketing Resources for Better Returns
In the past, so much of marketing plans depended on just making large, sweeping campaigns and hoping for as many returns as possible. For some it became an extremely costly exercise if they wanted to ensure good chances of success. With data-driven marketing, that has changed because the sheer quantity of it has increased, and the quality of that data has immeasurably improved too. Using that data, you can achieve far better results with less input. Data-driven marketing is making the most effective mass marketing more affordable than ever, allowing smaller companies to compete against even the largest enterprises.
5. You See What Works and What Doesn’t
One more key benefit of data-driven marketing is the fact that it allows you to see very clearly what works and what doesn’t in your wider strategy, as well as in your day-to-day operation. You can see if your campaigns are effective in very precise and meaningful terms, and you can see how your products and services are performing with all of your key demographics.
Data takes so much of the guesswork out of marketing, and that’s what makes it more effective and more budget-friendly.
