What is data-driven marketing in 2019?

Gleb Belkov
@hellotegra
Published in
7 min readMar 7, 2019

Advantages of data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing is one of the most crucial ways to optimize marketing processes and strategies to cater to changing trends. The basis of data-driven marketing is a huge number of experiments, based on the results of which gain deeper insight into what customer wants.

It is very simple and understandable.

Experiment — Result — Analisis

After a few tests, you clearly see who, what, where, when and why did it this way.

It’s difficult to describe how much this type of marketing has benefits. Therefore, you may have big interest and curiosity to know the numerous advantages of data-marketing:

  • It focuses on targeted customers.
  • Better product/service development.
  • Messages to consumers are built in a more detailed and personalized form.
  • Minimum failures.

These obvious advantages affect any business ROI.

Data-driven marketing: where did it come and why does it work?

The emergence of data-driven marketing is directly related to the invention of CRM. This software provides information about customers, especially contacts that marketers want to get.

Salesforce’s innovations to transfer the CRM system to the cloud served as the starting point for automated marketing sales. CRM appeared to automatize marketing. The leaders of this field were companies like Marketo and Eloqua which were the first to create profiles that could track all customer interactions and receive information about client’s e-mails.

Marketers had a problem with data volumes when they tried to segment a large number of customers.

From those days customers were tracked not only by media owners on marketplaces or emails but in paid advertising too. Different solutions like Neustar, Amplitude, and Attribution began to help marketers aggregate data in a more flexible way and produce new insights into a bigger creative strategy.

Key attributes. Important combination 3 in 1: Creative, Data and Media

So let’s see what is what.

Data is all the information you own about customers, their interaction experience and quality characteristics.

Media is the place of the message deliveries.

Creative is the message itself.

You have a few options to combine these elements and you should combine them.

1) Creative + data, without dependence on media

This process is fully based on all combinations of creatives and customer segments are set up on the creative platform. There is no optimization for each media or social platform. Further, the ad can be used several times at once in different ways. But do not forget that with this technique the quality of optimization may be much lower.

With this combination, you save time and shorten the path, but lose in optimization.

2) Creative + data + media aligned in one process.

Such a solution would be ideal for advertising on social networks in real time. Specific creatives will appear based on the data and the media parameters together — not just the data parameters. Each creative adopted for each social/media platform you use.

With a 3 in 1 combination, you achieve maximum optimization, but spending time on additional steps for loading ads and setting up targeting.

Each method can be relevant depending on the goals you’re pursuing.

Data-driven marketing examples

We will give several examples, which will relieve you from any doubts and convince you of the effectiveness of this marketing type.

Retargeting. First, use all the data you grab about your customers or customers you want to attract. Group them by segments and use email strategy or set up an advertising campaign to your advantage. Like the one, you can create with Facebook Custom Audience.

Dynamic advertising. Social networks are now more than a platform for communication. Make contact with customers. Turn your social media into two-way communication channels through ads to receive valuable information that feeds directly into your database.

Optimized paid search. Use keywords to drive traffic and be in the top of search results. So customers themselves will find you when searching for the product they interesting in. Experiment with combinations of keywords all the time and try to find your holy grail.

Critical skills for the data-driven marketer

In 2019 it’s hard to imagine an effective marketing strategy without an experienced specialist in growth hacking, is it?

What kind of skills a technical marketer should possess who is likely to be successful in data-marketing and help the company get the maximum results? We combined them in several blocks.

  • Experimentation

Here you cannot do without the experience of using special skills for grabbing and systematizing data. It includes Idea backlog, Understanding the product marketing itself, Product marketing fit and of course Data analysis.

  • Metrics

The specialist in growth hacking must understand and even be friends with numbers. Revenue calculation, Measuring retention, Funnel analysis, Customer acquisition cost and there are much more.

  • Creative marketing

Creativity is in every step in the marketing strategy. You need to understand the Psychographic personas and be able to manage clients, understand Viral marketing, Content marketing, Sales etc.

  • Behavioral psychology

First of all, marketing is the client’s psychology. You simultaneously know everything about clients, and at the same time know nothing. Use hook models to control your target audience and wow moments to achieve better sales.

  • Soft skills

One of the important qualities is a persuasion. It is necessary for every step in relation to customers and partners to achieve the desired result. Also, do not forget about the prioritization of your own business interests.

  • Conversation Rate Optimization

For an effective data analysis optimization process, you need to be good at statistics and at A/B testing. Both deep knowledge and practical skills in this area will help increase the ROI.

  • Engineering

Study Python or JavaScript or any programming language. It will be useful when you need to fix some email template or website lead form. And another great way to use this skill is to automize any process you want or need (parsing data or auto-liking in social media). Also, knowledge of SQL language will save a tremendous amount of time with data structuring compared to the visual interface of Google Sheets.

  • Analytics

Practical skills of working with big data and UTM tracking and database querying will help to find the necessary information in a short time.

  • User experience

Usability testing and user research are the key skills for understanding the desires and aspirations of the target audience. Without knowing client motives and interests, you will not be able to produce a product that best meets the needs of customers.

Among all the theoretical knowledge and practical skills cannot be identified more or less important. All of them are needed at different stages of data analysis, optimization and data marketing in general.

How to increase the return on investment? 6 the best tools.

Even the most effective advertising campaign for digital marketing needs to be improved. We will tell you about the 6 most important and useful tools that you will surely come in handy.

  1. Optimizely

This is one of the best solutions if you want to improve service quality and conversion. A/B testing on any device, multi-dimensional testing using client-side JavaScript code. It allows finding which leads to better customer experience and more conversions.

2. Google analytics

Among all existing, this is the most popular and modernized platform for web analytics. Thanks to this tool, you can track all the indicators: the amount of traffic, time spent on the site, sales, and much more.

3. Crazy Egg

When there is a need to present information more visually and figuratively, color diagrams, graphs, and volumetric schemes come to the rescue. Such a representation of data in a two-dimensional graph is called a warm map. So, Crazy Egg builds this warm map to show you how many clicks on links were made and what part of a website is more interesting to the visitors, and what they bypass. This tool is ideal when you need to visualize all data of the web activity.

4. HubSpot

This inbound marketing and sales software are used by over 30,000 peoples worldwide. And we happy to use it too :) Starting work in 2005, to this day, HubSpot helps to comprehensively conduct marketing in social networks, manage content and conduct web analytics. It has a huge number of features like a CRM system, a powerful SEO optimization tool or monitoring all the numbers.

5. Hemingway editor and 6. Grammarly

We did not just combine these tools into one group and put them together. They have completely different goals, but at the same time, they help to achieve one thing — quality content with a high readability rate.

The task of the Hemingway Editor is to make an analysis and provide you with data on the readability rate. Grammarly takes care of the content correctness in terms of spelling and punctuation.

Bonus tools:

Notion — all-in-one workspace for note-taking, project management and task management.

Funnelytics.io — an incredible tool that helps you build the best marketing funnel mapping.

Keep this information on yourself and use the right tools, depending on your goals and objectives

Research and Results

There is no perfect combination of data marketing strategy components. Each advertising company, each experiment or research has specific features and needs. In any case, you need to understand how to combine and coordinate all the components to better implement the strategy. So try, experiment and you will find your unicorn.

Be free to send us any feedback by reply or reach using DM on Instagram

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