Marketers’ days of hunches and going with their gut are long gone. Instead, the integration of intelligence into decision-making — from customer segmentation and creative optimisation to media buying and measurement — has become an imperative. Brands are focussed on marketing that’s more efficient, connected, and impactful.
With hyper-connected consumers setting the course, the buying journey for companies has changed. Research from Gartner looking at marketing spend in 2014 reveals that 22% of companies are reducing spend on traditional sales support activities to fund digital marketing. As data changes the very essence of marketing, today’s CMO is attempting to optimise the marketing engine with digital.
It’s all too easy for today’s marketer to drown in a deluge of consumer data, when brands have access to vast amounts of consumer information of varying quality and relevance. With too much ‘low quality, high quantity’ information being analysed by brands, data-driven marketing can seem complicated. But it doesn’t have to be.
Here are our top tips on how marketers can harness data to inform and optimise every step of the marketing journey:
Make sure your digital data is centralised
Every bit of data counts, but individual puzzle pieces won’t help you see the whole picture. Get a better understanding of who your customers really are by integrating your offline data with everything you’ve learned about them online. When customers are looking for that personal touch, knowledge about their product and channel preferences is invaluable.
Gather consumer intelligence
Using the data you’ve collected to paint a picture of your customers can create insights to help drive more effective marketing and business decisions. By looking for patterns that shape customer behaviour, brands can find and engage similar audiences to expand their reach and personalise their messaging to appeal to these groups. For example, we might know that 13-25 year old females watch ‘X Factor’, but we want to reach a subdivision of this group, such as females with an income of £30,000 that own a car. Advertisers can harness data on TV audiences like this to target a specific segment wherever they are, whatever show they are watching. With these real-time audience insights, consumers can be served relevant ads.
Aggregate media intelligence
Before you spend a penny, it is important to define ROI per customer segment and consider which channels will be best for reaching whom. Knowing when to reach out to customers, whether that’s via a text push notification while they are on the move or through a targeted email when they are watching TV, can be the difference between them turning “on” or “off”. By applying previously consolidated data and results to your media strategy, you’ll be ideally positioned to learn from, react to, and optimise for today’s competitive landscape.
Think about media planning and execution
Marketers no longer have to guess or base campaigns solely on big ideas – they can develop creative that will resonate with audience segments and align it across delivery platforms to ensure your target audience is seeing the right ad, at the right time, on the right device. For example, A/B testing can be used to see which messages lead to increased engagement or conversion. Data can also be used for dynamic creative optimisation so that the experience is truly personalised for each customer based on their previous anonymised preferences. By creating content tailored to your points of engagement and developing dynamic templates that can be efficiently repurposed, marketers can optimise in real time to drive superior results.
In a competitive market, it is important for brands to stand out from the crowd and those marketers that capitalise on the most useful data insights will be able to deliver the most targeted, relevant and efficient email, mobile, social and display campaigns. Taking control of the data-driven marketing workflow certainly puts marketers on the path to building stronger relationships with their customer base, but they will only be able to prove real business value if they measure the success of their brand campaigns.
It’s important to look back on your campaign through a data-driven lens to better understand your results and inform future strategies. After all, every engagement matters – having a holistic view of all interactions and using that data to derive insights and make decisions is critical.
By Pierre Naggar, Managing Director EMEA at Turn. Turn's full CMO Guide to Data-Driven Marketing is available here.
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