How Small Businesses Benefit 

From 

Data-Driven Marketing

Ads are everywhere. They’re in your emails, your phone, your TV, and even your fridge. Ads are annoying, but they also bring in revenue for companies like Google and Facebook. Companies spend billions of dollars each year on advertising, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. Advertisers use data-driven marketing strategies to reach their target audiences with personalized messages that enhance their customer experience. These strategies are applied using data analytics tools that help them understand what works best for each consumer.

Marketing firms that exceed their revenue targets apply personalization methods 83% of the time. Businesses that use data-driven personalized marketing recorded between 5 and 8 times the ROI on their marketing budgets. Personalization also helps companies attract customers who are more likely to buy products or services.

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Data-Driven Social Media Marketing to Drive Results (interactive presentation)

Here are examples of companies using data-driven market­ing and the technologies and techniques that help marketers target their desired audiences and effectively deliver their messages.

What Is Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing is a term used to describe a marketing strategy that relies on collecting and analyzing data about consumers, markets, and industries to create a plan for reaching them. Data analytics is the practice of using data to understand trends, patterns, and other information. Marketing strategies that use data to drive decision-making are called data-driven marketing.

Technology has ushered in the age of personalized marketing.

Personalization is a crucial component of digital marketing. Personalization allows marketers to target specific audiences with messages that are relevant to them. For example, if you’re running an ad campaign about a new movie release, you might show ads to users who like movies. If you’re selling products, you might show ads for those products to users who bought related items recently.

A digital marketing agency named Statista has outlined the steps required to implement an effective personalized marketing campaign.

• Identify the demographics (such as age, gender, and income) of the campaign’s target audience.
• Determine which products and services generate the most revenue in the target category.
• Use data analytics tools like Google Analytics to gain insight into your campaign’s target audience and create personalized experiences for those customers who visit your site.
• Use A/B testing and similar techniques to learn which message and media type deliver the highest levels of customer engagement.

Social media today describes hyper-personalized digital market­ing as the combination of internet technology and mobile devices to harness “all forms of data being collected in unison across all marketing chan­nels and customer journey stages.” The goal is to know precisely what the customer wants before they do and to move customers “from top of funnel awareness to post-purchase happiness in record time through greater and more effective engagement at each stage.”

Techniques That Enhance the Customer Experience

Harvard Business Review surveyed 1,000 executives at large U.S. companies. The study found that while many companies have made significant investments in digital technologies, they are still struggling to achieve the full benefits of those investments. The study also found that while many companies are making progress in creating a unified customer experience across channels, they are not yet achieving the same success in delivering personalized interactions.

• Customer data platforms combine customer data across different channels and sources to extract insights that help companies improve their customer experiences.
• Proactive analytics uses artificial intelligence to collect and analyze data about customers, marketing programs, and other business processes.
• Contextual interactions help companies understand where customers are on their journeys and to coax them into making the next step toward the company’s goals.
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Customer Value Analytics

Customer Value Analytics is designed to help companies identify which customers are most valuable and least helpful. These are among the key metrics that customer value analytics use to determine a customer’s value to the business.

• The historical value measures a customer’s historical value over time and compares it with the historical importance of other customers for the same period.
• A current value analysis compares recent activity with past values to determine the impact of different marketing campaigns, latest offers, and price changes.
• Lifetime Value (LTV) shows how valuable a customer is over a more extended period by calculating their average order multiplied by their purchase frequency.
• To determine whether a customer is a “cost to serve” customer, compare the profit generated to the costs associated with serving the customer’s support requirements.

Omnichannel Marketing Strategies

Marketing messages should be consistent across all channels. A company’s marketing strategy should be aligned with its overall brand identity. Marketing messages should be optimized for each channel, and the right message should be delivered at the right time.

• Increase the visibility of the channels where customers are most likely to be found.

• Make sure that the message is consistent across channels.

• Personalization enhances engagement and brand awareness. It increases customer satisfaction and retention. It also helps you understand your customers better.

• Measure the impact of your marketing activities across channels, then continuously optimize your processes and messages to improve your results.

There are several ways to improve customer engagement.

Marketing departments need to integrate all the data they get from various sources. Many of them are not clear yet, and they need to be prepared to handle any data. Data cleaning is an essential step in the process.

The customer engagement tech formula allows marketers to assess available technologies in three categories:

• Decision Engineering is an approach to marketing analytics that starts with the customer and works backward to identify what products and services will help them achieve their goals. It focuses on the end-user and not the marketer.

• Advanced analytics is a term used to describe the application of advanced analytical techniques to solve problems. These techniques are often applied to customer data to help companies understand their customers better. Advanced analytics helps companies create more effective marketing campaigns, improve customer service, and increase sales.

• Chatbots are an example of innovative technology. They are a conversational interface that allows users to interact with a system using natural language. These systems are designed to mimic human conversation. They are also called virtual assistants, digital agents, or simply bots. Businesses commonly use chatbots to provide customer service, automate processes, and increase sales.

Deliver the Predictable, Profitable outcomes that your Business Demands

While many businesses demand predictable and profitable outcomes, few achieve them. This is because they don’t have a clear plan or strategy. Without these critical components, it’s impossible to deliver the results that businesses demand. Fortunately, there are steps that companies can take to improve their chances of success. By creating a clear plan and strategy and implementing it consistently, companies can increase their chances of delivering the predictable, profitable outcomes they demand.

Predictable Results = Simple + Systematic + Consistent

To achieve predictable and profitable results, your strategy needs to be simple, systematic, and consistent. A simple process is easy to understand and implement. A systematic approach focuses the team on critical activities that need to be completed each step of the way. A consistent approach ensures that gaps in execution are minimized, allowing the team to deliver on the plan consistently.

When it comes to marketing and lead generation, many companies attempt to run multiple campaigns at once, which is a complicated strategy. Instead of generating leads, they end up confusing their audience, diminishing their brand. A more straightforward approach, like the marketing funnel, can be just as practical while minimizing complexity. By creating a free trial offer for your customers — allowing them to learn about your product with no risk — you can generate leads with this simple yet effective strategy.

The bottom line is this: If your company’s strategy is complicated and inconsistent, customers and prospects won’t know what to expect from you. They will become less willing to join you as they develop resistance to marketing messages, fearing that they will be pushed to take actions they aren’t interested in or can’t afford. Conversely, when your strategy is simple — allowing customers to quickly understand what you have to offer and when you have to provide it — acceptance rates will be higher, leading to more leads and happier customers.

Creating a Marketing Strategy Based on Data

A marketing strategy is only as good as the data it’s based on. Therefore, it’s always important to collect data about your target audience, your competition, and your marketing efforts. Without data, you’re just guessing.

But how do you go about creating a marketing strategy based on data? First, you need to understand what data is available to you and how you can collect it. Then, you need to develop hypotheses about what marketing strategies will be most effective. Finally, you need to test your ideas and analyze the results.

If you follow these steps, you’ll be well on your way to using data to create a marketing strategy that works.

A marketing strategy is only as good as the data it’s based on. Therefore, it’s essential always to collect data about your target audience, your competition, and your marketing efforts. Without data, you’re just guessing. But how do you go about creating a marketing strategy based on data? First, you need to understand what data is available to you and how you can collect it. Then, you need to develop hypotheses about what marketing strategies will be most effective. Finally, you need to test your ideas and analyze the results. If you follow these steps, you’ll be well on your way to using data to create a marketing strategy that works.

Step 1: Identify What Data You Have and Can Collect

You have more data about your business and the markets you serve than you realize. Some prominent places to start are:

• Customer service records
  • Demo or trial requests
• • Bidding or proposal requests
  • Payment history
  • Contact information
  • Social media comments and reviews
  • Blog posts and comments
  • Reviews of other resources (books, podcasts, etc.)

Each of these sources might provide a different glimpse into what your customers are like, what causes prospects to engage (or not) with you, and what content users find most helpful.

Step 2: Define Hypotheses That the Data drive

For example, let’s say you’ve collected customer service records that indicate how customers use your product. It might look something like this:

Based on this data, you might hypothesize that customers who purchase the training and the software product are more successful in using the software than those who buy the software only. You can test this hypothesis by collecting additional data (demo requests, bidding requests, payment history, contact information) or by asking specific questions in your customer service communications and then analyzing the resulting data. If the conclusion at the end of your testing is that your hypothesis was correct, then you’ve just discovered a way to serve your customers better. If it is incorrect, you can produce another idea or reflect on existing data to uncover clues about what might work.

You should always have several hypotheses to test. For example, if your trial request rate is high, people are interested in learning more about your product. However, if your sales conversion rates are low, it means that although people are interested, they’re not buying. This is where you can apply data-driven marketing by using marketing automation tools to nurture leads until their chance of purchase is higher than their chance to opt-out—or even zero.

Step 3: Address the Underlying Reasons Why Customers Aren’t Engaged.

Sometimes customers aren’t buying (or buying little) because underlying reasons prevent them from success. These “latent dissatisfiers” (water in the gas tank) keep customers from purchasing more from you or even buying from you regularly. 

You should always have several hypotheses to test. For example, if your trial request rate is high, people are interested in learning more about your product. However, if your sales conversion rates are low, it means that although people are interested, they’re not buying. This is where you can apply data-driven marketing by using marketing automation tools to nurture leads until their chance of purchase is higher than their chance to opt-out—or even zero.

You can also use data to optimize various aspects of your business, such as shipping costs or website speed. For example, a furniture store in Hong Kong was curious about the impact of using different delivery services on its expenses. It collected shipment data and determined which delivery service provider was the most cost-effective. As a result, the store could arrange shipping with the most efficient provider and save money, thus freeing up resources for other activities. Based on this success, the store expanded its data-driven marketing activities to learn more about the effectiveness of its advertisements. It ran A/B tests on product pictures and found that while one album of photos increased sales, the other set decreased them. With this insight, the store improved its overall customer experience by removing the offending pictures while keeping the effective ones.

Step 4: Use Marketing Automation to Get Results Faster

Marketing automation allows you to automate all steps of your marketing campaigns without having to do repetitive tasks manually. This results in a faster time to market for new products. By reducing the number of errors in each step of the process, you can increase your chances of getting the right message to the right audience.

A great place to start automating your marketing is email marketing. Most businesses send out hundreds of emails per day. But how many make an impression? And how often are these emails going unanswered? Let’s take a look at some common ways to fix this problem.

The email content is king. The best email copy gets straight to the point and delivers value immediately. When people receive your email, they need to know precisely what you want them to do next – and then quickly do so. To achieve this level of clarity, you must be clear and concise. Your subject line needs to hook the recipient and grab their attention. Make sure every word counts.

The biggest mistake companies make when it comes to email marketing is thinking that they can just create generic messages and blast them out to everyone. While there’s nothing wrong with sending mass emails, you’ll likely get better results by personalizing your messaging based on specific audiences. Regarding timing, email marketing works best when it’s scheduled around when people are already expecting something from you. If your company offers a monthly newsletter, try scheduling your email blasts during the month before your subscribers would typically expect to hear from you. Or, if you sell health and beauty products, you might consider scheduling your emails to go out over Mother’s Day weekend. (It doesn’t hurt to experiment.)

This report shows that social media marketing has become increasingly popular among small businesses. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ allow users to connect with friends and family, build relationships and grow online communities through blogs, forums, and groups. These websites provide a passive distribution channel for businesses to advertise their brand, products, and services. You should always strive to keep your content fresh and engaging, but sometimes less is more. Consider creating shorter posts (around 1,000 words) than average and focus on quality over quantity. Not only will this help drive engagement, but it will give you more opportunities to share your content across social platforms. Remember to research and test several types of content — images, videos, infographics, links, etc.

If you offer free shipping or discounts, you may want to adjust your prices accordingly. For example, you could change your price up to $1-$2 per product, depending on whether you have promotions running. Then, display the new adjusted pricing on your site. This way, customers sensitive to price changes won’t feel cheated by the higher rates.

There’s a good reason most marketers don’t think about building lists: It’s incredibly challenging and takes much work. Marketers who use a lead list tend to struggle with keeping leads coming in and moving those leads through various stages. They also find themselves with a ton of contact information—and no idea how to manage it. So, how does one move beyond simply collecting names and email addresses? How do you turn those contacts into paying clients?

PPC advertising is a method of advertising on search engines like Google and Bing. As mentioned earlier, with PPC ads, you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. PPC ads also exist on social media platforms like StumbleUpon and Pinterest, but they’re not currently available for Facebook advertisers. Remember, though, that, like many other forms of paid advertising, the amount you’ll spend depends on your budget and your target audience. With the ability to reach millions of readers at any given moment, thanks to digital magazines, bloggers, and even podcasts — everyone now has the chance to be heard, which opens the door for more brands and companies to voracious readers. Whether you’re looking to establish a personal voice within your industry or increase sales, being able to reach the correct person at the right time can make all the difference.

When it comes to video marketing, we know that content is vital. You must have an abundance of great articles and blog posts written first, and these should all be optimized and used as guide articles. The most important thing around these while is giving theming and direction to what you’re talking about. If you aren’t writing, you aren’t going to attract anyone to click. We then create our messaging based on the theme and what we’ve covered. Our team focuses on creating high-quality copy for every piece of content we produce.

A/B testing is another strategy where you compare two versions of your website’s page. In this case, A represents the current version, and B is the new variation. The purpose of A/B testing is to determine which version performs better. Some tools can help you analyze your data, such as Split Test Tool, Optimizely, ClickTale, and WebPageTest. Once you decide which option converts best, you can roll out the winner across your entire site.

Content is king. It always has been, and it always will be. Creating insightful, engaging, and unique content should be at the heart of any online business. Too often, people simply don’t obey this rule. An informative blog – created consistently and maintained frequently – is a fantastic way to stay connected with previous customers, present customers, and potential customers.

How do I prepare my company for a data-driven approach?

First, you need a system to collect and store your marketing and sales data. This can be done through an internal server or a cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud.

It is also necessary to define KPIs; this will ensure that the organization focuses on the right things. Next, you need reliable and accurate data to identify trends and prioritize activities. You will also require sophisticated data-driven tools to process the collected data to reveal these trends and make predictions.

Data-Driven Marketing Strategies

Data-driven marketing is a strategy that relies on information gathered from various sources to inform marketing decisions. Data can come from internal sources like customer databases, social media, and CRM systems, or external sources like public records, online reviews, and search engine results. Marketers use this information to create personalized messages for each customer. These messages are then sent via different channels, including email, text messaging, social media, and direct mail.

Personalize the Customer Experience

The best way to get people’s attention is by tailoring your content and online interactions based on their demographics, purchase history, and other information about them, like what they’re searching for on Google. For example, DirecTV created a personalized marketing program that targeted people who’ve recently moved, as Marketing Service Adverity explains.

Direct TV knew that people were more likely to try new products when they moved to a different location. The company combined USPS records of change-of-address applications with a personalized version for their homepage that only those people could see. The result was an increased conversion rate for the personalized homepage than for the standard homepage, despite the typical homepage offering a $300 gift card for new customers.

Coordinate Marketing Across Channels

Identity resolution is a method for marketing to customers across multiple channels. It helps companies understand what customers like about their products and services and then target them accordingly. Identity resolution also helps companies understand the differences between distinct types of customers and how those differences affect their marketing strategies.

Marketing Evolution describes a 3-step approach to automat­ing an omnichannel marketing cam­paign:

• Identify the data sources, which could include TV, radio, mobile apps, social media, paid ads, influencer campaigns, print, video, podcast, and other media. Consider how the target audience will interact with each source concerning your campaign’s goals and objectives.

• Data quality management is a critical aspect of any marketing strategy. Marketers cannot make informed decisions about their campaigns and customers without good data quality. Data quality management ensures that all data is accurate, complete, current, relevant, and actionable.

• Data checks and validation are essential to ensure the accuracy and reliability of data. Data is constantly changing and combining innovatively, so it must be continually checked and validated.

Use Predictive Analytics to Create an Ideal Customer Profile

Leadspace’s Account Based Marketing (ABM) platform helps companies identify their ideal customers and then reach out to them using personalized messages. ABM combines predictive analytics with account-level targeting to guide the best leads through the Sales Funnel.

An AI-based system for devising an ICRP has three parts:

• Predicting customer behavior is an integral part of any business. Predictive analytics helps businesses identify what actions will result in the best outcomes. It also helps companies understand why certain activities are practical. For example, if a company knows that a particular action results in a higher conversion rate, it can replicate that action across multiple campaigns.

• Data quality is critical for any analytical system. Data should be timely, relevant, and accurate. If you don’t have high-quality data, your model won’t be helpful.

• The expertise and experience of the team members must be converted to a form that the machine learning algorithm can use. The interface that connects the team with the analytics engine must allow real-time access to the results of the analysis, so the model can continue to be improved.

Use big data to track marketing ROI

Big data is a term that describes massive amounts of information that can be collected, stored, processed, and analyzed. Big data is often referred to as “data” that is too large or complex to be handled by existing tools. Data scientists use big data to analyze trends and patterns in data sets to gain valuable insights about customers, products, services, and markets. These insights help businesses make informed decisions and create new opportunities.

TechGenyz describes five ways data science is used to improve the ROI of marketing efforts:

• Data silos are an organizational problem that prevents organizations from fully utilizing all available data. Data silos prevent information from flowing freely across the organization. Companies must ensure that the data they collect is easily integrated with other systems and shared with internal and external sources.

• Streaming analytics helps marketers understand what is happening in real-time. This allows them to react quickly to changes in the market and adjust their strategies accordingly. Data trails give marketers an idea of how past campaigns performed compared to current ones. This gives them insight into what works and what doesn’t.

• Visualization tools help you understand your data and communicate the results more accessible for non-mathematicians to grasp. They can help you discuss the results of the analysis with other people. These tools can also help you identify trends and patterns in your data and enable data scientists and marketers to discuss their findings.

• Experimenting with different marketing strategies is an integral part of growing your business. You can test out other ideas and see what works best for you. Simple tests like A/B testing can help you get a leg up on competitors.
• Base marketing decisions on previous customer data by using data analytics tools to assign values to unknown, forecast the potential of obstacles, and determine the most effective ways to avoid and mitigate risk.

Transfer Offline Data to Online Environments via Data Onboarding

Data onboarding is the process of connecting offline data to an online platform. This means that you need to transfer your offline data to the online platform, and you also need to ensure that the data is anonymized before it is transmitted.

Offline data can help marketers better understand their businesses’ customers, and it can help them target potential customers and enable them to craft personalized messaging.

What tools do marketers use to analyze big data?

Among the most common tools and techniques, marketers collect data relevant to marketing activities and convert it into actionable marketing intelligence.

Optimizely

Optimize.ly is a tool that helps you test your website, mobile app, or connected device. You can run experiments to see if your users like different versions of your site or app. You can also compare two versions of your site or mobile app to see which one converts better. Optimizely is a progressive delivery and experimentation platform that enables marketers and other teams in organizations to base their decisions on actual data.

Key benefits and features include:

• It has an easy-to-use interface that makes it easy for data-driven decisions to be made.

• It seamlessly integrates with analytics platforms, tagging tools, content management systems, third-party data sources, and more.
• It performs multi-page, A/B, or split URL testing of websites, mobile apps, and web pages.

• It has an audience targeting option for exporting data, previewing campaigns, scheduling campaigns, using its stats engine, and using behavioral targeting.

Google Analytics, Google’s Page Speed Insights, Google Search Console

Google Analytics allows companies to track user behavior across multiple channels, including web, mobile apps, social media, and search. It also provides insights into what users are doing on your site, allowing you to see how visitors interact with your website and whether there are any problems with your code. Google Analytics can help you identify areas of improvement and optimize your marketing efforts.

Google Page Speed Insights helps web admins and developers optimize websites for speed and performance. It provides recommendations for making sites faster and easier to read. It also gives insight into how users experience your site, helping you identify areas for improvement.

Google Search Console helps you to understand your website’s search traffic. You can submit your URL to get an overview of how well your site performs in Google searches. You can also submit a sitemap to help Google crawl your site more thoroughly. If you want to see if your site is indexed correctly, you can check the index coverage.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe’s Creative Cloud is a suite of software products designed to help you create, edit, publish, and share your digital media. It includes Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Illustrator, and other tools. You can also access them through the web browser.

• It offers businesses a choice of four different purchase plans.
• It’s a good option for photographers.
• New features are available now.
• Its cloud-based storage and collaboration tools boost productivity.
• It provides companies with “seamless consistency across disciplines.”

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is an analytics platform that helps companies understand what happens when people visit their websites. It provides heatmaps, which show the areas of interest on a webpage. These heatmaps help businesses identify the best places to put their ads and where to place their calls to action. Crazy Egg is also helpful in optimizing landing pages because it shows which parts of your site get the most traffic.

Among the analytics tools offered by Crazy Egg are an A/B testing tool for comparing different versions of webpages; a page editor for modifying elements on the go; and a complete analysis that indicates where site visitors are coming from, how they navigate your site, and where they’re running into roadblocks.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a tool that helps you identify what your competitors are talking about. You can also use BuzzSumo to see what your customers are saying about your brand; this information will give you ideas for the latest content or campaigns. You can also use BuzzSummo to find influencers who might be interested in working with you.

BuzzSumo analyzes millions of posts daily and identifies keywords and topics that are trending at any given time. The tool analyzes data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.

If you’re serious about growing your business via social media, we offer a comprehensive. Our services include: 

• Social Media Marketing
• Data-Driven Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Artificial Intelligence-Driven Content
• Video Marketing
• Smart Marketing Custom Videos
• Business Intelligence 
• Marketing | Business Automation
• Email Marketing
• Market Research

If you want to learn more about our services. We can provide you with a free demo for your business. https://snkt.io/62bc94729c0efbf4098a5df5

Conclusion

In conclusion, small businesses benefit from data-driven marketing in several ways. Firstly, data-driven marketing allows small businesses to target their marketing efforts more effectively, thereby increasing the chances of conversion. 

Secondly, data-driven marketing provides small businesses with insights into customer behavior, which is used to improve the customer experience. Finally, data-driven marketing allows small businesses to track the results of their marketing campaigns to optimize their efforts and get the most out of their budget.