In this day and age, there’s no excuse for not knowing what your customers want. Gone are the days of untargeted mass broadcasting. The digital age has brought about widened reach, but pinpoint targeted accuracy.
There has been a change in marketing. We have seen a shift from what we called branded marketing to what I call people-to-people marketing. What this means is that customers, prospects, fans and followers want to connect with your brand, product and culture in an authentic, meaningful way. They don’t want the pressure and saturation that traditional marketing tactics tend to suggest. It’s about human connection. It’s about passion. It’s about interaction and connectivity.
Marketing nowadays needs to be data-driven to be effective. If you know your target customer’s behaviour, goals, pain points, and challenges, you can develop marketing campaigns that cater to their specific needs. Information such as a user’s browsing patterns, social media activity, online purchase behaviour and other metrics can help you focus your marketing efforts on what works. So, collect as much information about your target market as you can. This data will be at the core of any successful marketing strategy.
What is data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing is a set of techniques and tactics that leverage massive amounts of data to create effective marketing processes, targeting specific demographics and user groups at an individual level. This data can provide fantastic insights into consumer behaviour and taking advantage of it can be of vital importance to your company.
Big data is taken directly from customer interactions and this is precisely the kind of information that can help refine and improve any marketing strategy. In other words, it’s just as important to understand and organise this information, while deploying the right marketing tools and strategies to make the most of the data.
Why is it important?
Customers want information that’s useful to them, available at the exact time they need it, through the right channel, and on all devices.
It is important to think about that when analysing and improving your customer journey. Make sure you deliver the best experience in all key moments they engage with your brand.
According to McKinsey research, companies that use data-driven marketing get 5-8 times the ROI on investment. In addition to that, of the companies that exceeded their revenue goals, 83% used data-driven techniques to execute their marketing campaigns. Customer journey analysis, website personalisation and audience segmentation were among the most used techniques in the study. Once again, understand your consumer behaviours and patterns directly impact revenue.
Capitalising the micro-moments of the customer journey
The goal here is to market more strategically to our customers. The digital transformation and the amount of information available at their fingertips has caused our customers to want more—more engagement, more value, more memorable experiences—from our companies overall. And they want it on their terms.
Customer journey mapping has become a trendy way for businesses to make sense of their customers’ expectations and opinions throughout a product or service lifecycle. It ensures the best possible experience in all micro-moments of the decision-making process.
Google calls the exact time a searcher turns to their smartphone to find information about a place they want to go, a thing they want to do or a thing they want to buy, a micro-moment. It is an intent-rich sliver of the consumer journey. This moment is an incredible opportunity for the brands to capitalise on the chance to interact with the consumer. It also offers a chance to shape the decision-making process in that crucial fraction of the buyer cycle.
With the right data you can make sure all your marketing campaigns reach the right client at the right moment through the perfect channel, supercharging the effectiveness of your message and improving the conversion of your strategies.
If you want to get some tips on how to make sure you are using your data effective, check out our article “Top 10 tips to make your marketing data-driven”.
