Data-Driven Marketing - How to optimize marketing activities with a successful data strategy

How to optimize marketing activities with a successful data strategy.

Table of content

• Goals: What can you achieve with data-driven marketing?

• Process: How does data-driven marketing work?

• Implementation: How does MMT help with data-driven marketing?

• Conclusion: Is data-driven marketing the right strategy for my company? 

Goals: What can you achieve with data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing, like any marketing strategy, is designed to help people achieve their overarching business objectives. In essence, the strategy focuses on three goals.

First, data-driven marketing aims to provide insights based on data that can then be used to better adapt marketing campaigns to customer needs and requests. The idea is to better understand customer behavior and base your marketing strategy around this information. It should be possible to quickly recognize trends, changes in purchasing behavior, or a changed perception of the brand in order to ensure competitiveness.

Second, data-driven marketing works to make marketing campaigns efficient, performance-oriented and successful.

Third, data-driven marketing enables marketing experts to make quick and accurate decisions.

1. Optimize customer experience:

• Define and optimize relevant touchpoints of the customer journey
• Better understand customers at all relevant touchpoints
• Sharpen focus on target groups
• Tailor marketing measures even more specifically to the customer and personalizes the customer approach
• Increase the relevance of campaigns and content for target groups
• Anticipate customer needs, requests, and expectations
• Make predictions about future buying behavior
• Align communication with the current and most important trends
• Improve customer service, satisfaction, and loyalty

2. Optimize advertising campaigns:

• Precisely measure and improve campaign performance based on predefined KPIs
• Measurably increase campaign return on investment (ROI)
• Automate campaigns and increase efficiency
• Focus on attractive core target groups that are highly likely to purchase
• Realize cost savings through the targeted use of your media budget
• Strengthen your brand and improve branding

3. Enable the right decisions:

• Make more accurate and faster decisions
• Run predictive analytics
• Access helpful recommendations
• Derive predictions about future behavior
• Distribute your marketing budget optimally
• Select the right marketing channels
• Choose the right content
• Utilize strategic target group segmentation
• Use your media budget more efficiently

Process: How does data-driven marketing work?

In data-driven marketing, data is collected, merged, organized, analyzed, and made available for use along the customer journey in a single process.

Step 1: Collect data

In the first step, all data, both from existing in-house data sources and from new ones, is collected in a targeted manner. Data is taken into account at all touchpoints of the customer journey, offline and online across all channels. Thanks to social media channels and the high distribution of different end devices, as well as extensive marketing tools and systems, marketing experts have more data available today than ever before. 

The many available data sources can be divided into 3 different categories:

1st party data

1st party data is data that belongs to your company, e.g.:

• data from the CRM
• behavioral user data from your company’s website including buying behavior at your online store, user flow, jump ridges/bounce rate and dwell time
• user data from the company’s own apps

2nd party data

2nd party data is data at your company that is obtained from third parties, e.g.:

• from marketing partners including Google Analytics and Search Console
• analysis tools provided by social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

3rd party data

Data that is purchased from data providers:

• market research of user requirements, psychographic factors such as lifestyle, values and opinions, interests, preferences and buying behavior, demographic data such as age, gender, place of residence and social characteristics, and qualitative customer statements via online questionnaires, etc.
• search volume
• trends
• seasonality/weather data

Step 2: Data Integration

The biggest challenge is data integration. In this step, all of the marketing data from all of the systems, channels, and campaigns are compiled, processed, and organized in a central data warehouse so that this data can be correlated. This is how big data becomes smart data. During data analysis, data silos are broken down to provide a holistic view of the data. The only way to analyze data is to link it, which makes data-driven marketing possible. This process needs to be as automated as possible to ensure that the data is always up-to-date, agile, and flexible. Data sources can be connected via interfaces (APIs).

Step 3: Data analytics

Efficient analysis, and thus successful data-driven marketing, depends on having access to smart data and the appropriate tools. These tools need to interact with each other smoothly. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies are increasingly being used in response to the growing diversity of new data sources. This also requires organizational structures that function in a networked and integrated way instead of being silo-centric.

Step 4: Data visualization

A key objective of data-driven marketing is to enable marketing experts to make smart decisions quickly. To do this, actionable insights need to be derived from the integrated data at an early stage. Comprehensible, clear, and meaningful visualization in the form of dashboards is crucial for the success of a data-driven marketing strategy. Dashboards become the control center for all relevant KPIs, from campaign performance to advertising effectiveness and customer loyalty.

Implementation: How does MMT help with data-driven marketing?

MMT's marketing experts bring to the table the data, media, and technology expertise that it takes to be a reliable partner for companies when it comes to transforming their marketing strategy towards data-driven marketing.

MMT Scout: Marketing Data Management & Visualization

Marketing experts can access comprehensive information on the daily status of their marketing activities in the web-based MMT Scout, which acts as the marketing control center. Clear, ready-to-use dashboards, which are dedicated to monitoring marketing KPIs and budgets, support marketing experts in their analysis and reporting. This lets them make decisions fast and on the basis of expertise. Individual dashboards tailored to the needs of the company can also be implemented at any time.

 Dashboard in MMT Scout