Data-driven marketing has the potential to be every digital marketer's dream come true by providing intelligence to help inform decisions about your marketing strategy. Through the use of available data, you can hyper-segment your audience and provide targeting parameters that decrease CPC, stretch budgets and positively impact your bottom line.
But what does data-driven marketing even mean?
Simply put: the better you know your audience and prospective audience, the better you can market to them.
For example, imagine you have an email list of 2 million, your open rate is 1% (yikes), and you have premium tickets to sell. Instead of blasting your entire list, you could take a data-driven approach and email people on your list who who are more likely to buy - those who have clients to woo, have a high income brackets, are located in the area, etc. Beyond just emailing them - you could specifically target them on social with sponsored ads.
Here are three more reasons why you should consider investing more time and effort into data-driven marketing.
1. Honing Your Message
Data driven marketing enables you to go through every email list subscriber, Facebook follower, Twitter follower, Instagram follower, etc. and pinpoint their:
- Name;
- Age;
- Gender;
- Location;
- Social handles;
- Social reach;
- Education;
- Occupation interests;
- Geo-tagged content;
- Brand preferences;
- Interests;
- Influencers;
- Income bracket.
From these subsets you can make business and marketing decisions to ensure you're providing what your clients/customers want and targeting the the most relevant audiences with your messaging.
You can also probe through the aforementioned lists to see who is a legitimate influencer that you could potentially collaborate with, build an affiliate relationships with, or attempt influencer marketing with. Basically, it tells you exactly who your customers are, what they want, and how best to reach them.
Don't let what you've built collect dust or sit on the shelf - you've spent the time and effort collecting email addresses and developing a social media following. Use it to the max.
2. Improved Strategy
Data, essentially, helps you close the loop.
A deep analysis of your data can tell you:
- Where best to deploy a marketing campaign (email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc);
- What to say - messaging, brands, etc;
- Who to send it to - what audience;
- It can be integrated with whatever CRM you already have.
The best part of this is that this can be applied by any size of company. For many years, enterprise level companies have created and gained access to big data, but their biggest challenge is making the data small and useable. Those same insights are now available for all sized companies to access and use.
Most companies use this data:
- To reverse engineer an email list based off of competitor's followers.
- To analyze current audience demographic to segment audience and refine relevant messaging.
- To hyper target and decrease CPC with social media ads.
- To create a list of true influencers.
3. On Budget
Data-driven marketing can also save you thousands of dollars.
Consider this: when you're able to look at a list and immediately see who you should be targeting, your advertising dollars will go much further because your cost-per-click will decrease significantly. You'll be taking the guess work out of your targeting efforts and digital advertising dollars.
With this data you're able to re-target leads that have already interacted with your brands which converts a whole lot better than cold targeting marketing efforts. This, in turn, results in higher sales.
The other beautiful and beneficial element of utilizing custom lists for targeting and re-targeting on social is that you are no longer bidding against your competitors who are using the preset interest group options.
Here's a short case study.
A client of ours was spending $0.91 per link click. This would take an interested user from Facebook and they would land on the company's sales page for the notebook that caught their interest. With this she reached 3,692 and gained 55 people on her site for $50. Not bad, but with big data we've transformed her CPC, reach and web traffic. For $50, we decreased CPC from $0.91 to $0.04. As a result, reach increased from 3,692 to 9,999 and traffic went from 55 visitors to 1,355 visitors.
It's hard to argue with results like that.