What is Data Driven Marketing?

Lets Talk: Data-Driven Marketing

Data-driven marketing is the only type of marketing out there. It’s simple: all decisions are based on incoming data. The abundance of data available today makes digital marketing a more informed process.

In the past, companies relied on billboards, television, direct mail, and the like for messaging. Unfortunately, it was impossible to determine at which points, if at all, an audience was interacting with that messaging. No way to measure eyeballs on a billboard or listeners on the radio.

With digital marketing, everything is being recorded. Data collection is sophisticated and abundant and it lives on your website and social networks. Therefore if you’re not taking advantage of the massive amounts of data available to you, you’re missing out.

Frequently, I’ve observed that people do not accurately measure all the different interactions that can and do occur on their websites. We’re talking about the ads being run, SEO, or organic reach to the website.

Breaking Down the Data-Driven Marketing Process

Let’s break down further what information a data-driven process creates. For example, running digital ads meant to bring people to your site can be revealing if you ask the right questions and measure for the right data.

Here’s what I need to know:

Did the ad get in front of enough people? I figure this out by studying the click-through rates for a given industry. By click-through rate I mean the number of clicks that an ad receives divided by the number of times the ad is shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR. A/B testing

Moving on, if the ad is getting clicked on then the next step is to look at the landing page that people are being led to after they click. The landing page will contain some actions that I want people to complete. That could be filling out a form, making a phone call, or something else. I measure if they are getting to this vital next step.

The process should result in viable leads, so at that point, the sales department takes over unless the leads are not good.

Reevaluate by Testing

Do A/B Testing to refine results if the leads from the ad are not what you want. Do this to reevaluate the type of traffic that’s being pulled in. A/B testing involves using the exact same ad but changing one thing about it to measure the result. I may have the exact same ad, the exact same ad copy, and maybe I’m testing for different audiences that the ad is targeted for.

Digital marketing is very scientific in that nature. You develop a hypothesis of what you think will work based on previous experiences with the industry or audience. So, that means that you are constantly looking at the data and constantly looking at every different stage to determine how to make marketing efforts better.

Now, each platform, whether it be Facebook ads or Google AdWords, has its own intricacies and metrics. A really good digital marketer understands the difference in platforms and the corresponding metrics.

Data driven marketing involves making decisions based on good hypotheses.

However, you have to be able to test and adjust as needed. Digital marketing is not a one and done exercise. It’s ongoing with data accumulation and adjustment. Data-driven marketing is a deliberate method by which customer data is used to create an informed marketing strategy.