Knowing what message is likely to resonate with the consumer assumes top priority for brands as we step firmly into the age of the customer. It is a time when the customer is spoilt for choice, and the mediums to catch the customer’s attention are exploding. Today, brands have to make their products look attractive on the shelf, their advertisements look good on the screen, and capture the mind space of the customer to capably drive better revenue outcomes.
As retail marketing gets more complex, the need for a solid, reliable, and straightforward fact base becomes essential to enable reliable and profitable strategic and tactical choices to drive marketing initiatives. Developing data-driven marketing strategies, as such, becomes non-negotiable in today’s digital world to:
- Make informed marketing decisions
- Improve the effectiveness of campaigns
- Employ the right channels to reach the customer
- Drive more revenue
Retail Needs Data-Driven Marketing
The highly competitive retail industry can no longer do without data-driven marketing. As the digital revolution disrupts traditional retail models, digital interactions are influencing the dollars spent in brick-and-mortar stores and the overall customer journeys.
So, organizations leveraging data appropriately can excel at:
- Identifying valuable business opportunities from the data to drive decisions and improve marketing return on investment
- Employing insights to drive product development to elevate customer delight
- Delivering products, services, and offers most effectively into the market
The market has become increasingly complex, rendering marketing decisions guided by hypothesis or previous experience irrelevant today. Influential marketing strategies that translate into revenues must now be guided by data and deep analytics to drive customer experience by understanding customer behaviors.
Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing
Data-driven marketing allows organizations to investigate the likely consequences of their actions before they act. This enables fact-based decisions instead of relying on intuition and allows organizations to create more targeted, efficient, and effective campaigns that deliver real value to their customers.
Some of the clear advantages of data-driven marketing are:
Identify and Target Customers
Previously, customer information was based on customer demographics and records of earlier sales. The insights from this data were insufficient to formulate impactful strategies.
Today, as data channels increase and the customer generates more data than ever before, it is possible to get a 360-degree view of the customer. Unifying data from all sources and analyzing real-time data with historical data can provide deep insights into consumer habits, buying preferences, preferred platforms of interaction and engagement, and many other insights that can influence the customer journey.
Analyzing customer behavior and demographics data helps marketers create more targeted campaigns and deliver them to the customer at the most opportune moment over the platform of their choice.
Elevate Marketing Efficiency and Drive Greater Impact
Data-driven marketing allows organizations to distinguish between the impact of their actions and the effects of market trends. It allows marketers to identify the performance drivers they need to pull for desired revenue outcomes.
Organizations can identify and prioritize the most effective marketing channels and create strategies based on consumer behaviors, thereby improving the outcomes of marketing initiatives.
Data-driven marketing allows organizations to build personas around those who engage with the brand to then target other people similar to the current customer base. Starbucks, for example, employs data generated from their app to identify the most ordered drinks at a certain time of the day, seasonal trends, customer habits, preferences, and more. They then curate marketing campaigns and promotions targeted to their customers based on demographics and location based on this data.
Drive Digital Advertisement Strategies to Improve Customer Engagement
Data-driven marketing is essential for impactful digital advertisement strategies. The customer employs different methods of accessing online information. Given the increasing competitiveness in the market, it also becomes important to know the customer beyond what they want to buy from a brand.
Organizations can get clear insights into customer preferences, how they want to be engaged, how and when they would want to be contacted, and their preferred methods of payment as well. Data analytics also helps organizations in better order fulfillment as it allows them to take all customer information and synthesize it to show whether any timely promise is feasible.
With clear insights into buying patterns and more, marketers can create tailored strategies and leverage the digital space optimally to increase brand awareness and revenue. Organizations can make smarter decisions on which channels and distribution mediums to invest in and the length of marketing campaigns.
Data analytics and machine learning algorithms further improve marketing outcomes by delivering promotions to customers purely based on their specific needs. Hyper-personalization ensures customers buy the product or service and promotes brand loyalty by building relevance.
Conduct Qualitative and Quantitative Market Research
Organizations must also conduct qualitative and quantitative market research to create impactful marketing plans and promotions. A comprehensive understanding of the market state and buying influencers and a focus on identifying upcoming trends cannot be realized using traditional methods.
Favorably, comprehensive data analytics tools allow organizations to conduct qualitative and quantitative market research faster and more extensively. With access to current, real-time, as well as historical data, organizations can create actionable marketing strategies for the business.
Challenges With Data-Driven Marketing Facing Marketers
While data-driven marketing is non-negotiable for business success, here are a few challenges that marketers must navigate.
- Finding and maintaining high-quality data. Accurate, timely, updated, and high-quality data is essential for good marketing initiatives.
- Preventing data duplication and conflicting information while ensuring the data is relevant, real-time, and up-to-the-minute.
- Accessing different kinds of data to drive appropriate market segmentation. The right behavioral data is essential to effectively group customers and reach them at the right time.
- Increasing reach impactfully by identifying the right digital ad spaces and gaining greater visibility on campaigns.
- Proactive course correction and optimizing ad placement and style efficiently to make conversions.
- Navigating the data silo chasm and ensuring that data is stored in a centralized location and can be easily accessed by all the right stakeholders.
- Capturing real-time data signals and delivering valuable insights immediately to connect with customers at the right time through the right channels.
- Identifying the right data tools to segment, target, and process real-time data efforts.
The Role of Technology
Tech solutions like programmatic advertising are taking much of the pain out of data-driven marketing. Programmatic advertisement employs ad exchanges and places ads on the right sites based on factors such as demographics and industry. These ads are completely scalable and also allow organizations to put a monetary ceiling on their campaigns to prevent overspending. This helps organizations maximize the marketing ROI by leveraging advanced algorithms to identify the placement of advertisements.
Discovering the right data management and collaboration tools further prevents data silos. They ensure that the data is available through an accessible dashboard and help data-driven marketing strategies.
Comprehensive industry-agnostic data platforms that provide advanced data intelligence and marketing to take insights to the next level are also helping marketers to improve their forecasting and marketing efforts. Such comprehensive data platforms further allow them to:
- Provide geo-based consumer buying trends
- Identify consumer buying habits by store boundary
- Model dynamic trends to power complex supply chain decisions
Data platforms must also help marketers track market-level promotion and performance as well as intimate them of all changes to competitor promotions to help them proactively drive marketing decisions. Marketers can further use the data platforms to:
- Identify and generate triggers that initiate buying journeys
- Measure performance against opportunity
- Increase ad impressions and conversions
- Curate the best go-to-market strategies
Improved ROI emerges as the natural consequence of taking a data-driven marketing approach.
Looking to maximize ROI through data-driven marketing? Get in touch for a personalized demo of our future-ready programmatic advertising technology.
