Any agency you consult with will not deny that data-driven marketing has made huge inroads to our ability to target certain markets. More businesses of all sizes are turning towards. Data-Driving this type of marketing to help them acquire more sales and better align their branding and marketing options to their consumer behaviour, like other tools, data-driven marketing is just a single tool in the marketing arsenal. It is not the golden egg of all marketing efforts.
Yes! We can determine a lot of failures and successes by using data to create marketing campaigns, however, there are a few challenges to using this particular method to gain insight into the customer’s behaviour. It is the inconsistencies that we need to analyze and truly scrutinize before we decide to invest in targeting a certain segment of the population, simply because the data demonstrate that these are the buyers.
Data Is Everything
Most marketing companies will tell you that data is everything – and we would have to agree, providing the data is fully scrutinized. The data is the framework that shapes the marketing campaigns you build. It is the focus that turns the marketing strategy from a shot into never-never land to an informed initiative made to grow your customer base. The data allows you to segment your audience and to create personalized marketing campaigns to certain segments. The problem is that the data information presents certain obstacles and you need to overcome them to make the campaign successful.
Keep in Mind that Data Comes from Multiple Places
A data-driven marketing strategy usually takes data from multiple sources and this necessitates deep scrutinization. The reason is that the data you collect from different sources is somewhat inconsistent. The tools you use to get this data are also complex. It is sort of like asking 3 to 5 people for directions. The first person will explain that the destination is one way, and the second person will give you different instructions. This data you collect from many different places is often slightly inconsistent. You need to organize the data with specialized tools to clean the data. However, you may outsource these kinds of operations to professionals, such as reliable seo agency, for enhanced results.
Data cleaning is a program or tool that identifies and eliminates certain information that causes discrepancies in the information. You need to ensure the data is clean by checking it, reviewing for duplicate content and scrutinizing the logic behind the output.
Data quality is imperative to good marketing campaigns. Let’s say again, you ask someone for directions and they only give you directions that get you near your destination but not there, then you won’t get to your final destination. By the same token, if you use incomplete data, you can’t target the right audience. You need to eliminate the inconsistencies and keep your data clean.
The KPIs
The content received in your data serves a purpose. If you can’t take action on certain data you receive. Or if you receive data and dont know what to do with it then you don’t have the right key performance indicators (KPIs). How do you find the right KPIs? It is relatively simple but does require some thought. You need to:
Determine the goals
- Identify the data that will contribute to attaining these goals
- Create a marketing plan based on your KPIs
- Analyze existing KPIs and replace old ones if necessary
Just watch out for those vanity metrics which are pieces of information that seem impressive but don’t contribute to the objective. You also want to beware of duplicate statistics or “performance” indicators that don’t reflect on the real performance.
Identify the Actionable Data
You need to be able to take action on the data you receive. Ineffective data is information that won’t give you a clear follow-up action. If you can’t identify the marketing step you need to make, the data is not actionable and does you no good to track and measure. Actionable data helps you identify relationships, patterns and relevant information between different data sources. To see this insight you need to really understand your marketing goals. Having said this, you should also know that there are tools to help you identify the hidden correlations in data sets and speed up the time needed to correlate data across different platforms.
Inadequacies in Data Driven Marketing
In this type of marketing so many things can go wrong, especially if you have unsupportive management and a restrictive budget. However, simply finding any tool to help does not actually fix the inadequacies. Poor tools or broken tools are other detriments to getting adequate data. This only causes you to find contradictory reports and poorly integrated data sets. This is why you need to scrutinize the data, but more importantly, you need to find content data mining tools that are appropriate for your company. This is when you can turn data into a good marketing strategy for the company.
