In this day and age, there’s no excuse for not knowing what your customers want. Marketing needs to be data-driven to be effective. If you know your target user’s behavior, goals, pain points, and challenges, you can develop marketing campaigns that cater to their specific needs. Data such as a user’s browsing patterns, social media activity, online purchase behavior, and other metrics can help you focus your marketing efforts on what works. So, collect as much information about your target market as you can. This data will be at the core of any successful marketing strategy.

How to Make Your Marketing Data-Driven

Truly? Yes, truly. Let’s face it, most leaders of Marketing organizations – and many other types of organizations for that matter – talk a good game about the importance of being data-driven. It’s a good sound bite, in large part, because it’s both rooted in common sense and it embodies the modern in “modern marketing.”

But actually being data-driven is a very different thing. A fraction of organizations really nail it when it comes to having data be at the forefront of even most decisions. What are the keys to making the data-driven sound bite ring true? Here are a few

1. Personalize Your Campaigns

With carefully analyzed data to back their marketing strategies, marketers have a much better idea of what and when to send marketing messages. This timeliness and accuracy increases the chance of striking an emotional chord with the audience and encouraging positive engagement.

2. Optimize Multiple Marketing Channels

Leads generated through Facebook respond differently to leads generated from the Google Display Network (GDN). This is why marketers need to create and implement their strategies according to which channel leads are coming from to optimize conversion rates

With data-driven marketing, you can identify which channel performs the best, and which message evokes the desired user behavior. You can also identify which content format works the best at any given time in any marketing channel—be it email, social media, or blog posts.

3. Focus on Your Loyal Customers

Implementing the right customer retention strategy will also go a long way toward improving client relationships and increasing their lifetime value. Loyalty programs have also made it easier for business owners to provide an efficient way to track purchases and use this data to monitor which promotions and incentive schemes customers respond favorably to. It has proven to be an effective means of tracking purchases and analyzing your target group’s buying behaviors or patterns.

4. Embrace Marketing Automation

Marketers can easily find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data pouring in through many different channels. And, unfortunately, not all of it is going to be useful. But if a data-driven strategy is going to work, you need to take in a lot of information from as many different sources as possible so that you can get some meaningful insights regarding your customers.

That’s where automation comes in. Investing in marketing automation tools is not just a fad, it’s soon going to be the norm. Because if you want to be able to use all of the data you’ve acquired effectively, you can’t waste your time going through all of it, when you can just as well let a algorithm do that for you.

Advanced data analytics and metrics are at your fingertips. There are various tools, both free and paid, that entrepreneurs and companies can employ to study the marketing behavior of users. To improve every marketing campaign, you really need to know everything about your users. That’s what target marketing is all about in this digital era.

Implementing these solutions can completely change the way in which you do business. With the right creative minds on board, now freed of the burden of doing busy-work, you can see your marketing strategy take off instantly.