Data-Driven Marketing – How to Design and Implement Your Strategy
Posted on: May 5, 2015 | By: Jim Bertler | Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Dynamics Manufacturing
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Data-Driven Marketing – How to Design and Implement Your Strategy
Modern day marketing is no longer driven by intuition or educated guesses. With advancements in technology, current day marketers have access to large amounts of data to help them make informed decisions. Data-driven marketing is about identifying the important metrics and required data points, choosing appropriate tools to record and analyze these data points and gaining the required insights. Data-driven marketing enables marketers to better understand their target segments, define specific buyer personas and then create more focused and targeted marketing campaigns. Above all, it helps marketers understand the users’ actions, thereby providing a basis to improve the users’ experience. If understood and acted upon, all these factors may have a great positive impact on your business.
Here are a few important guidelines to help you develop a data-driven marketing strategy:
Determine Your Analytics Strategy
Before you start to design a digital marketing strategy, it is important to understand business analytics. The three phases of Business Analytics are: Descriptive Analytics, Predictive Analytics and Prescriptive Analytics. The first stage of analytics is Descriptive Analytics, which explains past performance. Predictive Analytics is used to determine future outcomes of those events. Prescriptive Analytics suggests actions to be taken for desired outcomes during the Predictive Analytics. It is important to understand the business objectives of your organization, the problem you plan to solve, and then choose the type of analytics you plan to implement. In general, the analytics are implemented in the order of: descriptive, predictive and prescriptive.
Complete a Business Process Assessment
The key to success for implementing a data-driven marketing strategy lies in building the processes that translate the insights from the data to decision making. In order to achieve this, a business must have a clear understanding of how the current processes are operating and how the performance of various activities is being measured. This is done by defining a set of KPIs, which measure the performance of key areas of your business.
Similarly, you want to define a set of actions to be performed by your organization based on the customer’s actions. This helps you automate some of your customer interactions and also send triggers to related departments which will increase the efficiency of your business.
Also, by defining the thresholds for your KPIs, you will become alerted to tracked event abnormalities.
Data Collection: Emphasize the Right Data
Every action performed within the organization and taken by the customer can be transformed into a data point. Designing a data-driven marketing strategy does not mean collecting all data. It is about identifying and collecting the relevant data. The primary exercise here will be to identify the important set of data points among all available data points. The KPIs defined in the previous step will provide guidelines to help choose the preferred data points.
It is also important to pay attention to hidden data points and inferred data points. By eliminating inferred data points, data redundancy can be avoided. Also, identify all data available in your organization and establish relationships among them. You might also check to see if your organization may be using software products that are tracking a set of data points of which you are not aware.
Data Capture: Choose the Right Tools
Once you’ve designed your marketing strategy, it is time for implementation. Ideally, this will not be a standalone IT project; rather, it will be much more effective and valuable if it is one which also includes your marketing and sales departments. The marketing department should drive the process by listing their necessary set of requirements and relevant products. They should also analyze the feedback and tool recommendations received by IT in order to narrow down the best solutions. Marketing should develop a deeper understanding of how IT operates to ensure business needs of the organizations are met in the most efficient manner.
The primary goal of data-driven marketing is to convert numbers into meaningful insights and actionable recommendations. It helps to continually review and revise your marketing campaigns. Capturing meaningful data and improving marketing campaigns based on resulting data is considered a ‘virtuous cycle’ that will lead to maximized return on investment and increased customer engagement. The insights provided by the data should be used to continuously advance your marketing campaigns and to ensure successful marketing efforts.
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