How to develop a data driven marketing strategy

First things first

The first thing we’re going to look at when creating a data drive marketing strategy is our goals. What do we want to achieve? There are about fifty types of data signals, each eliciting a specific tactic —some work best to generate brand awareness, others are the recipe for mid-funnel consideration and a third group will tip the scales to cause conversion.

Tips for every stage of the consumer journey

What is the goal of our data driven strategy? Do we want to bring our brand to the top-of-mind of our prospects? Our best choice is possibly then to tap into affinity segments—such as foodies or travel buffs or beauty mavens. We can also make it fun and experiment with environmental signals such as location, weather or time, at this point. This will trim off the gross of the population who definitely don’t care for our brand while still allowing for a wide reach. It’s a far more effective technique than traditionally used socio-demographic targeting —there could always be a few more video game addicted grannies than we’d think!

Do we want to generate leads to our site? We probably then want to target users that are searching, browsing or reading content related to our offerings. Contextual and In-Market targeting will work wonders. Remember to always subtract your retargeting lists from this tactic or you’ll end up paying more than you need to.

And what if we already have significant traffic to our site and want to hit the turbo button to boost sales? All we need is love —or retargeting campaigns. This is the art of listening before speaking, watching before doing. What are our leads seeking? Can we identify patterns that will help us understand what they really want? Waste no opportunities, my friend.

Let’s leverage our data sources

Once we have our goals set, the next question we’ll want to ask ourselves is what data sources do we have at our disposal? The best data is without a doubt the owned, first party data, harvested directly by the advertiser. It’s advisable to collaborate with a data analytics agency so they can help us transform raw data into actionable insights, but we can also do this internally with a little patience. Create a propensity model and bundle product offerings based on identified patterns. Extrapolate your best clients’ profiles and find their look-alikes within the bigger audience. We can also purchase audiences from other companies or data providers such as DMPs or Google.

Lastly, remember to take advantage of A/B testing. There is no good data driven marketing strategy without constant monitoring of KPIs and ongoing optimization —No wonder data driven advertising is often at its best on always-on campaigns.