The principles of marketing and sales remain the same in the digital age, but a whole new range of tactics must be used to attract and retain customers. Your digital marketing needs to be data-driven if you are to grow or scale it.
With consumer demand and expectations of user experience continuing to grow, it is important that your company’s marketing uses all available data to meet these demands.
Consider data like sonar equipment on a fishing trawler; if you know where your ideal customers are you can focus your energy on catching them.
What is data-driven digital marketing?
Simply put, it is a systematic way of collecting data from visitors and buyers on your website.
From this you can tell what their pain points or needs are and can predict (after enough testing) the outcome of a particular offer or what type of marketing will work best for finding customers, engaging with them, and converting them into sales.
It is one of the areas that Revolution specialises in. We consider ourselves experts at interpreting all this data which can be very time-consuming but also very rewarding for our clients in the long term.
Combining Data
The reason data extraction can be so time-consuming is that there is usually a strong need to combine data from several different sources.
The reason for this is to get a clearer understanding of who your audience is and what their pain points or needs are. Once you know those two key things, you can then begin to work on all the other areas that make a customer’s needs complex. There is no straight-line journey, it is about taking different pieces of the customer puzzle and putting them all together to try to convert them from a visitor to a customer.
The more holistic picture you can get of your ideal client, the better chance you have of attracting them.
Use the right sets of information
For some businesses, gathering data can be overwhelming and so they tend not to do it or to do too much of the wrong data. Making sure your using the correct set of information can save time and stress!
You have to know which kind of information you should be collecting and analysing in the first place.
A simple thing to do is to look at one of your competitors who is doing better than you and see what they do. There is something that you are not likely to do if they are performing better than you with a similar product or service. If there is something they are doing that caught your attention, then copy it and adapt it to your product or service.
Get to know your customers on a personal level
If somebody is putting bread on your table and helping you achieve a certain lifestyle, then you really should get to know them as if they were a personal friend. You need to know what they like and dislike and what they react to positively.
Data will help you figure out the answers to those questions about visitors and customers, but more importantly, will help you design campaigns to attract more customers like them.
Customers are expecting more and more personal engagement and if you can achieve that you are well on the road to success.
Be channel-specificÂ
There are data technology and research methods to show the services and products your current clients are buying. For example, if the iphone77 is the latest, hottest channel people or buying in, then you can tailor ads and campaigns around that.
Also, it is important to use the channels your preferred clients are using so if they are using a smartphone then prioritise the website and sales pages to be optimised for smartphones.
If you can’t understand data, let an expert do it
If you don’t know how to do it and want to make more good business decisions than bad, then let an expert do it.
With so many different variables to look at to try to gain insight that it can be overwhelming. Sometimes, it is more profitable to let an expert do it and to spend your time on getting more sales rather than working on backend analysis because that is basically what capturing data is.