A client of mine made an interesting comment recently. He said that I rely too much on data when making marketing decisions. Data-driven marketing is a fantastic tool to use on many occasions, but he disagreed.
“You just have to go for it sometimes,” he said. In a way, he is right. Marketing has always been a mixture of art and science. That said, data-driven marketing has its advantages. There are reasons why relying on data is a good thing in marketing and we are going to talk about them in this article.
A Great Start
The most important thing in marketing is understanding your target audience or customer. Without a good understanding of the customers and the market in general, there is a big chance your marketing efforts will not be as effective as you want them to be.
Understanding the customers, especially in today’s market, is all about collecting the right data and processing that information. There are plenty of tools you can now use to better understand your customers. Big data and AI-based analysis are becoming more accessible for this purpose.
The best marketing agencies and service providers are using the same data-driven approach to better understand the consumer black box too. We see services such as Deluxe data-driven marketing excelling on the market because they know exactly how to gather relevant data and utilize it.
Refinement at Its Best
Another big advantage of relying on data when doing marketing is refinement. Marketing is never a one-time thing; you can’t expect to formulate a marketing campaign and not do regular evaluations of its impact on the market.
Capturing feedback from the market is easy now that you have social media and various other digital channels at your disposal. You can learn more about the way customers react to your marketing campaigns and adjust the campaign accordingly.
The end result is very effective. Instead of waiting until the end of the campaign to evaluate the results, you can make better marketing decisions along the way and achieve abetter return on investment (ROI) on every marketing campaign you run.
Great Cost-Efficiency
Speaking of ROIs, another big advantage of relying on relevant data is cost-effectiveness or efficiency. Not all businesses have a big marketing budget to burn through. In fact, the majority of small and medium enterprises have limited resources when it comes to marketing.
Achieving that high ROI becomes more important and data-driven marketing decisions are how you can get to the maximum cost-efficiency in many cases. Using relevant data, you can evaluate individual marketing instruments, decide the best ones to use, and make the entire campaign more impactful.
It doesn’t stop there either. Another big advantage of data-driven marketing is a great learning curve. You have the ability to carry the data from past marketing campaigns over to your latest campaign. It won’t be long before you start making better marketing decisions and running more effective marketing campaigns.
Should you go with your gut every now and then? Definitely! After all, marketing is as much about art as it is about science. That said, gathering and analyzing data from the market will give you that extra edge you need to stay ahead.