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With the market becoming complex and consumers becoming increasingly picky about their experiences with the products or services, marketers have to create personalized messages to gain competitive advantage — and that requires data.
Marketers are more focused than ever on using insights backed by data to better understand their customers and data-driven marketing is the only way forward. Not only it helps in creating experiences that customers love, but also in interpreting data to forecast future behaviors and make marketing decisions in real-time.
More than 63% of marketers said they have increased their spending on data-driven marketing, and around 20% of all marketing spend goes on data-driven advertising campaigns. (According to Digital Doughnut)
Source: MarketingCharts.com
Following are the predictions around the critical steps the industry will take in the coming year to deploy more targeted campaigns and increase revenue streams:
1. Developing marketing campaigns based on customer’s proximity and buying habits will get mainstream: Customizing advertisements based on the present location and the localized data you receive regarding where your potential buyer eats, socializes, shops will sway them to check out new deals offered by you.
Wherever they go, they will start seeing the advertisements that connect with them. The popular proximity-based marketing techniques include near-field communication (NFC), social check-ins, geofencing and retargeting, among others.
2. Brick-and-mortar retailers will succeed with omnichannel: Retailers are going to benefit with the omnichannel strategy that links online with offline. For example – retailers can intelligently use the data collected from different locations they have about their customers and make informed decisions for opening new store locations.
They also can use this data to make decisions about which stores to shut down or repurpose. Many are also involving augmented reality technology to help customers navigate in-store. Big shots like Target have added mapping functionality to their apps to help customers locate products that had current deals in their local stores.
3. Marketers can offer real-time personalization with streaming analytics: Streaming analytics, the evolution of big data, has not been taken full advantage of until now, but if used efficiently it can help marketers identify target segments based around prospects views, lifestyle events, etc.
This technology allows you to analyze millions of events per second, facilitating fraction of the millisecond response and instant decisions in real time. This technique can payback tremendously—increasing revenue, boosting conversions, providing opportunities for cross-sell and upsell, and strengthening customer loyalty.
4. Data-driven buyer personas to know who your customers are: The concept of buyer personas is quite engraved in most marketers’ head, but what matters is the formulation of quality, data-driven personas that don’t come easy.
For example, a company selling software solutions should know who uses and who procures those solutions, where they spend the most of their time, how they can be reached out, etc. However, with voluminous data available, it can get complex.
Here how a buyer persona looks like
Source: SalesFusion
If marketing teams excel in finding out where the users are, what are they looking for, where and when they buy, and whom they buy from, they can use it to tailor the process for each persona, improving both leads and their experience.
How to Develop a Data-Driven Approach to Marketing:
The company looking to benefit from data must be aligned completely in terms of data accumulation, organization, implementation, and analysis. For this, they require a strategy in place to help the business understand how they can collect data, use and manage it throughout departments.
The Organization Needs to be Restructured:
For data-driven marketing to be paying dividends, different departments should all cooperate and share data with each other. Simply put, silos must be broken down especially between the development and the marketing departments.
It’s not only the responsibility of the sales and marketing people teams to get the relevant data from outside sources, but also IT should play a critical role in connecting the touch points all over the business, and assist in the data collection and integration.
Create a Holistic Marketing Strategy:
Another great way to break down silos is to have organizations develop a cross-functional team, which includes the involvement of marketers and IT. A Forrester research found that around 50% of BI and analytics deployments and reports are for the marketing teams of the organization. This doesn’t mean that only the marketing team has to handle the marketing data and technology.
The organization must use the skills of IT in making the most sense out of your data and insights, technology choices, and deployment. Both the CMO and CIO should work together, group all areas of expertise, bring together resources, and ensure that scalable and robust platforms are in place to deliver long-term value.
Integrate Data
Companies will need to combine data coming from various sources to get more accurate and holistic data needed in understanding your customers well. This helps marketers get a single actionable view of customers’ and prospects’ data.
Today, most enterprises have invested in various marketing technologies that specialize in different areas, resulting in siloed data and many times lack of visibility of the customers’ behavior, and absence of a 360-degree understanding of customers.
To address this known issue, enterprises necessarily need to integrate data from disparate systems. One of the Global Data-Driven Marketing Surveys suggests that businesses are taking it seriously and have made progress to overcome this challenge – with around 43% of execs reporting they have made possible fully integrated data across teams today, compared to 18% in 2013.
Leverage Analytics
when the above step is done, marketers can make more informed and relevant decisions about their buyer personas. They can utilize analytics to get value from insights and guide the decision-makers of the company. Diving deep into customer insights can support many departments, including finance, marketing, sales, among others.
Conclusion
With 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced each day, there lies myriad of opportunities for marketers to take the guesswork out and replace it with hard data. Creating a data-driven marketing isn’t quick, and involves making changes across your organization to be truly effective.
This article may help you in understanding the trends and adopting these strategies can benefit the retailers, marketers, advertisers from all domains to navigate the changing landscape like never before. You can also take help from a reliable digital marketing agency like SRV Media, who can help you in your data-driven marketing initiative, and reap its benefits.
(Disclaimer: This is a guest post submitted on Techstory by Mr. Rohit Prasad, Co-Founder and Director of SRV Media and EaseBuzz. All the contents and images in the article have been provided to Techstory by the author of the article. Techstory is not responsible or liable for any content in this article.)
About the Author:
Mr. Rohit Prasad is the Co-founder and Director of SRV Media and Easebuzz. SRV Media is a renowned digital marketing firm in India. Easebuzz is an online payment solution that mainly caters to the small and medium enterprises.
SRV media provides a one stop solution to digital marketing requirements with services like search engine optimization, social media marketing, design & branding, mobile applications, website development and more.