Data Driven world

Few days back when I was at a friend's place discussing our new project, we came across the term Data quite a few times. In fact, we discussed a lot on the Data we collected. While we were reviewing the documents, all of a sudden he said, "Whenever I see or hear the term Data, the first thing that comes into my mind is, a route to success. I feel without data there would be no past, present and future......".

You might be feeling I'm exaggerating by saying "There would be no past, present, and future".

Well, I'm not ...... If you observe you will find, the recordings of all the happenings throughout centuries is the root of knowledge. Without data there is no knowledge. Without knowledge there is no scientific research, medicine, industrialisation, and most importantly there would be no facts. 

Whichever industry you work in, or whatever your interests are, you will almost certainly have come across the terms "Data", and how it is changing the face of the world. Be it any field without data there is no progress. 

Data helps you,

• Improve people's lives
• Make informed decisions
• Find solutions to problems
• Stop guessing game and back arguments
• Be strategic in your approaches
• Know what you are doing
• Make most of your investment
• Access the resources around you, and,
• Keep track of all baselines, benchmarks, and goals to keep moving forward.

You might be wondering why am I speaking about Data.

Well, the reason behind speaking about Data is, "Understanding the importance of Data for your business" and "Data Driven Marketing"

In today's technologically advanced world, everyone has access to data, but what is more important that having data is, identifying and utilising the data that would help you are your organisation grow. Most of the data you find is unstructured and identifying the right kind of data (knowledge) is the ultimate solution to all our problems.

Importance of Data for Businesses:

People tend to generate a lot of data each day. you name it and you will find it (online). B it health related information to favourite song, from fitness to movies, travel to best, you will find it all. 

 

Date helps businesses in,

• Mapping organisation's performance
• Improving your customer experience as well as finding new customers 
• Making decisions quicker, solve problems fast
• Measuring success of your organisation and employees
• Understanding users, market, and the competition

Data is no longer restricted to just tech-savvy organisations, diverse businesses who are into agriculture, Hotels, and Insurance are also using data for better marketing strategies, improve customer experience, understand business trends, and collect insights. Insights gathered from user data is the major tool for decision makers and it is used to measure employee success. 

I hope you have understood the importance of Data in Business, now let us look into the importance of Data Driven Marketing.

Importance of Data Driven Marketing:

"The foundation of marketing campaign and key to deliver personalised customer experience lie in your data"....... In this technologically connected world, there is no excuse for not knowing what your customer wants. 

Marketing today is driven by data-backed research and customer information that can be captures at every stage in the process. We don't need to guess what people want, we just need to know where to look. 

If you know your target markets behaviour, requirements, and challenges, you can develop marketing campaigns to cater to their specific needs. Data such as buying patterns, social media activity, and other metrics can help organisations focus on marketing efforts on what works. So, collecting as much information as possible about target market will give a good results.

Marketers today need data for everything from client presentation to reports fo company leadership, in this stage data-driven marketing provides concrete insights into how well or not your activities are working. 

Data-Driven marketing 

• Helps you reach right people - Ideal customers
• Help you boost ROI and sales through vast amount of information (prospective clients and leads)
• Help you answer "Where your customers are" and other questions related to prospective clients
• Help you see what works and what doesn't. it can provide accurate, unbiased assessment on the performance you marketing tactics, strategies, and campaigns.
• Communicates valuable information in a clear, concise, and powerful way with your team and senior management. 

Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing:

• Data-Driven marketing can help you create highly targeted campaigns with unique, personalised messaging for each customer. It will give you insights on each customer, including their interests, lifestyle, and online activity. Data can guide your content marketing strategy as well as let you know where and when to post ads and marketing material.
• Data-Driven marketing helps you identify specific content that is leading prospects trough your sales funnel. This help you plan your budget.
• Data-Driven marketing can help you know your customers before they even get anything from you. Data can alert you beforehand what their interests and preferences are so you can target them with the perfect messaging that will get their attention to persuade them to do business with you.
• Data-Driven marketing can create a buzz, a need or want for your products. 
• Data-Driven marketing can help you nail this formula for success by giving you insights into your prospective customers as well as the quality of marketing collateral. it can give you insight into the weak areas of your marketing so you can make improvements.
• With insight into your prospective audience, you’re not only bringing in more sales and revenue for your company. You are also providing a better buying experience for your customers. 

How to create a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy:

Without data your team is not as efficient or successful as it could be. There are some ways to create data-driven marketing strategies.

• Use Data to identify Goals: You can’t have a great marketing campaign without goals. Data from previous campaigns can provide baseline measurements for the new campaign. Your goal is to beat those last year’s numbers. Data can tell you areas where you excelled and areas that need improvement. Additionally, data can show you the potential reach and effectiveness of your marketing campaign with all the improvements made.
• Use Data to make budgeting decisions: Chances are your organization has a budget. Every department, including marketing is vying for a larger cut of that budget. Data-based marketing will give your CEO, CFO and stakeholders concrete evidence of the ROI and value of your marketing activities. Your chances are even greater when you can show data that reflects your department boosting the company’s profitability while also spending less to get those sales and conversion. Data can show management such things as acquisition cost per customer, email open rates, click through rates, website page views, number of purchases, and more.
• Use Data to tailor marketing efforts: As mentioned previously, data-driven marketing can tell you a lot about your prospective customers before, during, and after they make it through the buyer’s journey. Here are some ways that companies have used data in their marketing to produce marketing tactics that are tailored to each of their audience members:
• Personalised Email Campaign
• Retargeting
• Landing pages

End Note:

Data-driven marketing is critical to the success of any marketing campaign. It informs you about your customers and gets them the right information at the right time at each stage of the buyer’s journey, helping them to convert from prospects to customers to evangelists. Data-driven marketing can help you develop more valuable relationships with your customers and better adapt to their changing tastes, helping your company to become better able to compete in a changing market.