It goes without saying that data is now regarded as the crucial element of every marketing campaign, which is not surprising. After all, there is more data available to us than ever. However, the sheer amount doesn’t guarantee success.
Namely, you should know how to turn data into insights to improve your marketing campaigns, which is where data-driven marketing campaigns come into play. They use customer data to optimize performance because they allow you to better predict customer behaviour.
This means they help you target your audiences more precisely and personalize customer experiences, thus boosting your ROI. To be able to do that, you need a contact management and data management platform, which stores, organizes and activates the data you’ve collected from various sources.
It also allows you to see all the data combined for an overall understanding of your customers across platforms and devices. If you’re interested in finding out more about this, we recommend you take a look at this short guide, created to help you design a successful data-driven marketing campaign.
Set a clear, attainable goal
Start by defining what success means to you. Your goal should guide the campaign and help you measure how successful it was. It can be anything from improving sales or raising brand awareness to drive more traffic or boosting customer satisfaction rates. The goal needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound, i.e. SMART.
Know your target audience
To reach your goals, you need to reach your audience first. Since you can’t target everyone, you should narrow your search and focus on those groups of people most likely to take the action you need them to, so that you get closer to your goals.
Who is most likely to buy the products or services you offer? Think in terms of their demographics, behaviours and motivation. Once you’ve discovered your ideal buyer, it’s much easier to create a campaign they’ll respond to.
Get the right data
No campaign can work unless your data is accurate and relevant. You need information about your customers’ sales histories, service communications, actions they took on your website, surveys they’ve completed, etc. Since most people use Google products and services, it’s a good idea to be able to efficiently share Google contacts within the team and keep the contact list clean, updated and maintained, allowing access to anyone on any device and app.
Choose your channels wisely
When you know who you’re targeting, you need to decide how you’re going to do that, i.e. choose which marketing channels you want to run your campaign on. It can be any combination of social media sites, your website, pay-per-click ads, emails, TV and radio commercials, magazine ads and billboards.
Try to be as specific as possible, since there are a lot of social media sites and publications, for example, but you need to find those that will help you reach your audience in the most effective way. You need to go where your customers are.
If you don’t know that, use your data to find out what kinds of media they use and the places where they are most likely to respond well to your content. That kind of data will set you on the right track, but you might need to fine-tune your strategy as you go.
Create relevant and appropriate content
Think about your audience and their preferences. Do they prefer videos or blog posts? How long should your content be? Videos seem to be the most popular type of content for this purpose, but your audience might not share that opinion.
The content will also depend on the channels you use and the goals of your campaign. Take all these elements into consideration when creating your next marketing campaign.
Track it and act on the feedback
The start of your campaign must not mean the end of collecting, processing and using data. On the contrary, it’s the campaign that is going to generate much more data, which should provide you with an even better insight into how you’re doing. That’s why you need to keep track of and analyze how often your audience has completed the desired actions.
Having a clear view of the behaviour attributes in customer interactions and how they impact the success of your efforts will help you refine your target audience and make your next campaign even more efficient since you’ll be able to eliminate ad waste and pinpoint patterns in high-performing content.
You might even discover new audiences that have to be included in your next campaign. The bottom line is that you need data for your marketing efforts. However, you need the right type and the right amount of data to be able to use it properly.
Also, you should be able to interpret it correctly, so that you make the right conclusions, assumptions and predictions. Only then can you expect your marketing campaign to yield the results which would help you achieve your goals.