Data-Driven Digital Marketing

A Holistic Guide to understand Data-Driven Digital Marketing

The way we do marketing has come a long way. Marketing approach and execution have witnessed a paradigm shift. Unlike the good old days when marketing relied on gut instincts and assumptions, marketers now rely on the most authentic information source- data. It has led to the emergence of Data-Driven Marketing. In this blog, we will understand multiple facets of data-driven marketing and understand how to implement it to get the most out of your marketing efforts.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing feeds on consumer data to elevate brand communication. It forecasts consumer requirements, desires and expected behaviours. As this data revolves around consumer demographics and behaviours, it supplements marketing professionals to approach the right audience in the right places and at the right time. These insights guide in creating tailor-made marketing strategies to achieve the maximum ROI.

This information is classified based on the sources. It originates from:

• Zero-party data- Consumers share this data willingly through surveys, interviews and personal interactions.
• First-party data- When audiences interact with a website, application or physical store, they share some information with the business.
• Second-party data- When one organization shares its first-party data with another organization via a collaboration, it is called second-party data.
• Third-party data- Data gathered from other organizations or sources that do not directly interact with customers to reach a widespread audience. Generally, this data is derived from government, academic and not-for-profit sources.

The difference between Conventional and Data-driven approach to marketing

The conventional marketing approach involved learning about the target audiences, deciphering and predicting customer requirements and ultimately crafting strategies to deliver offerings that fulfil customer requirements. Marketers either relied on existing marketing studies or followed their instincts and assumptions about the target audience to achieve these marketing objectives. This approach came with a high probability of trial and error, requiring businesses to execute multiple strategies to identify and finalize the one strategy that can help them accomplish their objectives.

Data-driven marketing on the other hand is a complete game changer as it eliminates the loopholes pertaining to timing and assumptions, enabling marketers to meet the right customers at the right time by offering the right products and services. Implementing data-driven marketing goes way ahead of simply enhancing communication. It helps gain transparent customer insights to personalize their experiences, target clearly defined segments, earn new customers, and further evaluate and refine their strategies in real-time.

How does data empower marketing?

Realizing the strong influence of data in modern-day marketing is very important to make sound decisions and make the best out of the campaigns. When businesses utilize the right data, it helps build well-targeted and result-driven campaigns that audiences relate well with.

• Customer data analysis enables marketers to track trends to customize how their message is delivered to customers and enhance customer engagement wherever possible.
• A/B testing helps evaluate multiple perspectives and find out which marketing approach is best suited for their products and services.
• The data-driven market research gives deep and meaningful insights to analyze what is trending and which opportunities businesses can capitalize on.
• Social media analytics give rich information on all types of consumer behaviour- their tastes, preferences, feelings towards each brand they follow and much more. Based on the same, brands modify their social media strategy.  
• Automation tool integration aligns data collection, analysis and utilization, helping businesses save time to focus on areas of strategic importance.
• Predictive analysis helps marketers plan for strong future growth by determining challenges and opportunities in past data.

The bottom line is to understand that modern-day marketing success greatly depends on realizing the power of data in driving their business towards success and leveraging it as a competitive advantage.

How different industries are implementing data-driven marketing

Healthcare

The healthcare industry demands intensely close attention towards personalized customer care owing to its sensitive nature. Data-driven marketing can help personalize diet plans and send reminders for health examinations and follow-up appointments. Data-driven marketing can help healthcare entities transform the journey of patient acquisition, significantly reducing the cost of the entire process. It can smartly help healthcare entities track their ROI by analyzing how many conversions in the form of an appointment call each marketing campaign helped generate. Accordingly, the budget for what is performing and what is not performing could be adjusted. It can also help segment their patients into categories- loyal, frequent, not frequent, new and prospects. Accordingly, the bid for digital ads can be fine-tuned to convert new patients into loyal patients.

Hospitality industry

Data-driven marketing can augment customer experience, smoothen the flow of operations, enhance customer experience and ultimately boost profitability. Similar to healthcare, data-driven marketing has a powerful impact on the facets of customer segmentation and personalization. Through analysis of colossal customer data available on demographics, tastes, preferences and behaviours, entities from hospitality industries like hotels and resorts can target their audience with utmost precision. As customers give a great deal of importance to personalized experiences while booking a place to stay, data-driven marketing can help hospitality businesses craft their promotional strategies and shape their offerings.

Travelling industry

Understanding the thought process and buying behaviour of travellers can help industry components like destination marketers, airlines and tourism agencies attract travellers and influence their decision to choose a destination. Travel data and trends facilitate learning and targeting them at relevant touch points. For example, despite readily available online information, a majority of travellers rely on the information shared by online travelling agencies the most. This holds tremendous implications for advertisers promoting their offerings to travellers on these websites. Data about the importance of content is also crucial. Data provides the travelling industry players with meaningful insights that help strategize and deliver impactful messages at the right places and times.

Telecommunication industry

Consistently evolving technology in communication has put tremendous pressure on conventional voice and data services, thereby putting immense pressure on the telco industry to improve their offerings and innovate. Given the current business model, Telcos are facing tough pressure in terms of cost and customer experience. Some challenges that Telcos face include diminishing capital investment, increasing operational costs, price wars and much more. Data-driven marketing can help remedy these problems. Telcos can analyze the data stored in diverse sources and gain deep insights into what the customers want by understanding their lifetime journey. Data analytics and business intelligence help Telcos with aspects like fulfilling consumer needs & enhancing loyalty, boosting network performance by tracking performance and identifying loopholes, keeping a check on competitors and very importantly, monetising data through aggregating and anonymizing it.