Data-driven marketing (DDM) is simply a broad strategy that places emphasis on audience analytics, consumer insights, and predictive intelligence.
Data-driven marketing uses insight from customers and prospects to deliver targeted messages, offers, and content that increases response rates and ultimately accelerates marketing lead generation.
Predictive analytics can be a game changer. It can give us clues about which customers and prospects to invest in from the very first interaction. It can show us how to find customers more accurately, and how to find better customers. We can also use strategies, such as Account-Based Marketing, to move from the targeted individual to many individuals with a targeted account.
Why do we care? Well, with between 65 percent to 90 percent of buyers doing their own online research before ever contacting a vendor, marketing professionals must find new ways to get in front of prospects before they’ve made their purchasing decisions.
Leveraging data in marketing helps us decide where to focus our marketing spend. Moreover, it allows us to understand our prospects better and speak to them in a direct, personalized way.
But with data everywhere, it difficult to decipher which data we should be focusing on. After all, data is utterly useless to us if we don’t know how to properly analyze it. For the purpose of helping marketers sift through the data madness, let’s focus on three high-level ways marketers can leverage data to drive more leads, increase engagement with prospects, and better nurture existing leads.
Offer a Personalized Experience to Attract New Leads
This aspect of data-driven marketing may seem a little overwhelming, so let’s start with a simple example to demonstrate why this might be a great option for your organization.
Let’s say that a web-based, work collaboration software company knows their target market is split evenly between marketing and sales professionals. The company understands the two different buyers want to receive different content when they enter the company’s website or receive a marketing email. The sales professional and the marketing professional will inevitably be using the product for two different reasons and should be served content that is relevant to their individual wants and needs.
Using data-driven marketing, the web-based work collaboration software company will want to understand who is coming to their site using website visitor tracking, and then deliver individuals personalized content to help them understand the value of the product within the lens of their professional role. Tools such as dynamic content can help with landing page and form personalization, and tools such as Evergage can deliver targeted website content using basic anonymous visitor behaviors.
Create Custom Messaging to Nurture Existing Leads
Email marketing campaigns are a great way to reach your target audience and nurture them along their buying journey. If you’re lucky, your CRM and Adaptive Marketing Platform are filled to the brim with leads waiting to hear from you. However, for both deliverability and results, it’s important you tailor your messaging to the appropriate audience.
Tailored messaging dramatically helps you avoid the dreaded delete button and increase your email response rates. Data-driven marketing can help you segment your database by role, job function, seniority level, or engagement to deliver one-to-many messaging that feels like it’s one-to-one. Again, analyzing data about your target market and ideal customer profile can help you to speak in a more direct, personalized way with little or no additional effort. Here again dynamic content can help, make it easy to craft and send targeted email campaigns based on information you know about your prospects.
Use Predictive Analytics to Target Your Next Most Likely Buyer
This is where you’ll want to use data to focus on the future growth of your lead generation programs. Using predictive analytics is a great way to help your marketing team focus on prospects that are most likely to be receptive to your messaging. Predictive analytics can be as simple as using your adaptive marketing platform to determine lead scoring, providing insight into which leads have shown interest and are ready to be passed to sales.
A recent study done by DMA and the Winterberry Group found that investment in data-driven marketing in 2017 grew at the highest rate in the last five years.
Once you’ve implemented these three data-driven marketing strategies to increase highly qualified, bottom-of-funnel leads, you should move on to more complex strategies such as data analysis on online social interactions, online search behavior, and consumer surveys.
And before you know it, you’ll be a data-driven marketing machine.