Data-Driven Marketing Insights: With Examples & Case Studies

“There were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every two days.” Eric Schmidt, former Executive Chairman, Google

British mathematician Clive Humby once said, ‘Data is the new oil.’ This could not be more true in today’s digital world. More than 400 million terabytes of data is processed, consumed, and collected daily by organizations and consumers worldwide. Such large volumes of data are potential gold mines waiting to be harnessed.

Data is essential for informed decision-making in your company’s day-to-day activities. Having the right data insights will promote better innovation within your company. Data will increase company efficiency while providing a better customer experience. This is exactly why you need to use a data-driven approach in marketing.

In this article, we will look at what data-driven marketing is, why it is important, and how it is different from traditional marketing. We will also go over the various benefits and challenges associated with this kind of marketing. We will finally look at a bunch of real-life examples, which drive the point home.

What Is Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing focuses on using data to guide your marketing decisions. Data from various sources helps you decide your major communication channels. This data is used to pick your target audience from several ages, genders, locations, and occupations. It will also tell you which brands you should be working with.

The common data sources are customer relationship management (CRM) platforms (Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho), market research tools, audience research tools, website analytics tools, competitive intelligence tools, email marketing platforms, and social media platforms like Instagram.

Data-driven marketing helps your marketing team reach customers through targeted marketing campaigns. It ensures minimal wastage of resources by telling companies what their high-value customer segments are. Marketers are also able to get a better understanding of the best marketing channel.

Why Data-Driven Marketing Matters?

Marketing leaders everywhere say the same thing about data-driven marketing: it is an irreplaceable part of a successful company’s business strategy. A whopping 87 percent of marketers believe that data is their company’s most underutilized asset. 64 percent of marketers “strongly agree” that data-driven marketing is crucial in the economy.

Adopting a data-driven marketing strategy is essential to gain valuable insights into customer behavior. Through data analysis, you can pick up crucial market trends that would greatly help upscale your business. Personalization is a very important facet of marketing, and having access to relevant customer data will help fast-track the process.

Data-driven marketing enables you to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of your company. Having the right data can help you develop an omnichannel strategy that will diversify your marketing efforts to ensure you target every segment in your customer base.

Traditional Marketing vs. Data-Driven Marketing

Traditional marketing is mainly done through print ads, radio ads, and television commercials. While marketers in areas with low digital penetration are justified in using such mediums, they will not be relevant for long, considering the large-scale and widespread adoption of Internet services.

Traditional marketing also has several other drawbacks associated with it. For starters, for many companies, large-scale marketing could be an issue. But more importantly, traditional marketing does not deal with real-time data monitoring. The various marketing methods in traditional marketing are time-consuming and expensive.

Data-driven marketing can help brands offer customized marketing campaigns. It allows you to create a well-defined target audience, which leads to better targeting of individual market segments. Real-time data monitoring lets you use up-to-date data, which will reduce wastage and increase ROI.

Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing

Data-driven marketing offers several benefits to your brand. From better targeting of your customer base to finding out the marketing channel that best suits your needs, the benefits are numerous and varied. Let us take a look at some of them.

Better customer targeting

It was found that 58% of marketers are challenged with targeting or segmenting their audience. As a marketer, you want to make sure your products and services reach your intended audience. The last thing you want is to miss out on high-value customers because you did not have the data needed to track them down.

Market segmentation is one way through which brands can achieve better customer targeting. Customers are divided based on their demographic characteristics, like age, gender, location, and profession, or psychographic characteristics like personality, beliefs, and values. The shared characteristics in each segment will ensure you get maximum ROI.

Effective personalization

Human beings have always had a deep desire to feel special. Personalized shopping caters to this innate human quality by designing products and services in a way that they resonate across customer segments. However, personalization is possible only when you are equipped with the right data-driven insights about your customers.

74 percent of customers are frustrated by content that is irrelevant to their needs. 56 percent of consumers would reward personalization with a purchase. 94 percent of brands say that personalization is a key to success. Data-driven marketing works to leverage marketing data to push out highly personalized products and services.

Efficient resource allocation

Companies work with limited resources, and smart business owners would look for the most cost-effective way to conduct their business operations. Data-driven marketing allows you to spend your marketing resources on the avenues that drive the highest growth.

As with customer targeting, segmentation data also helps in resource allocation. B2C firms can engage in procedures like geographic segmentation to efficiently allocate their resources, while B2B firms can employ firmographic segmentation to differentiate between potential clients based on industry, company size, and more.

Optimize communication channels

There are multiple possible avenues for digital marketing, like email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing. Picking the right one for your business can seem like a daunting task. Delve AI is here to simplify this task with our very own AI Marketing Advisor (coming soon).

The Advisor consists of tools like Social Advisor, Sales Advisor, and Media Advisor that let you promptly pick out the right channel for your company that is best suited for your budget and goals. However, sticking with just one channel may not be the best strategy, as 84% of marketers recognize that multichannel campaigns are more effective than single-channel campaigns.

Challenges of Data-Driven Marketing

While we have seen that data-driven marketing has several benefits, several challenges might also come your way, so you have to stay vigilant. Let us take a look at some of them in detail.

Data privacy

In this day and age, data privacy is a very sensitive issue, with 79 percent of customers saying that they will stop doing business with a company if they learn that their data is being used and collected without their knowledge. There are several ways in which brands can collect data while remaining cognizant of data privacy regulations.

Usually, newly installed applications on your phone request access to information like location, storage, and contacts. The application providers must list out the reasons why they seek this information and provide a clear undertaking that this information will not be utilized for any other purpose. Websites must allow visitors to set their preferences for cookie usage.

Poor quality data

It is common knowledge that inaccurate and incomplete data will inevitably lead to poor analytics. This will cause companies to make bad decisions, which will affect customer relations as the needs and preferences of the customers are not being met.

Poor data quality can arise from a variety of factors, like poor data migration and data decay. When data migration happens from a traditional system to a cloud-based system, some of the data tends to go missing. Data decay happens when the same old data is being used over and over again without any updates.

Data collection

Nowadays, data collection is a relatively simple process, but it can still seem intimidating. There are a lot of things that could go wrong, particularly when it comes to the accuracy of the data. There is always the chance of data going missing, and with the data already in hand, privacy concerns may arise.

Luckily, multiple tools are available at your disposal that will streamline the whole process to a great extent. These tools include CRM software, Google Analytics, or even online surveys. You could always resort to simpler tools like case studies, checklists, interviews, surveys, and questionnaires.

Lack of data literacy

Data literacy is the ability to read, analyze, and utilize data effectively. What this means is that you need to know your way around handling different kinds of data. Each person in an organization possesses a different skill set, and their skills must align with the task that they are presented with.

Upskilling programs in your organization, paired with proper data literacy training, can help resolve a lot of the issues related to data illiteracy. Employees need to be trained in the usage of data collection tools like surveys and interviews, and they need to know their way around data analytics tools too.

Data compliance

Data protection laws are different for each country, and sometimes different states within a country might have different laws. It might get cumbersome for brands to keep track of all the acts. For instance,

• The US has federal data privacy laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and state-specific laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
• The EU has the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
• Canada has the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).

Brands must implement strong data governance policies that will ensure compliance with data regulations. Existing personal data must be secured using encryption and proper access controls. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) needs to be set up for very sensitive data.

Data-Driven Marketing Examples

We have seen the benefits and limitations associated with data-driven marketing. Now the question that will naturally arise is, how does one go about doing data-driven marketing? Let us look at some tools that will help you in this endeavor.

Buyer personas

A buyer persona is a profile of your ideal customer created based on geographic, demographic, and psychographic data. The data consists of quantitative and qualitative data. The qualitative data is collected using interviews, surveys, and focus groups. The quantitative data is sourced from industry reports, government records, and CRM data.

Although we use customer data to create personas, you would have to do very little of the data collection yourself. During the creation of personas, Delve AI enriches your first-party data with 40+ data sources from across the web, and three to six buyer personas are created. These personas can then be used for ad targeting, content creation, and product development.

Artificial intelligence

AI is proving to be an irreplaceable tool in data-driven marketing as it can process vast amounts of data and derive meaningful patterns from the same. AI chatbots, with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP), help provide an effective grievance redressal mechanism.

We have seen earlier that personalization is an indispensable part of an effective marketing campaign. AI is at the forefront of using customer data to create personalized products and services, whether it is for streaming platforms like Netflix or e-commerce giants like Amazon. Google also offers personalized, targeted ads with the help of AI.

Personalized email marketing campaigns

A data-driven email marketing strategy helps to personalize content, thereby increasing CTR. It is meant to increase customer retention by re-engaging inactive users. Buyer persona data can be used to segment customers so that personalized emails with relevant information can be sent.

Email marketing is one of the most effective channels for driving conversions, with a 2.8% conversion rate for B2C brands and a 2.4% conversion rate for B2Bs. Delve AI’s AI-powered email advisor (coming soon) is designed to enhance the effectiveness of marketing emails, helping brands attain more conversions through their email marketing.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing approach that focuses on high-value accounts rather than the market as a whole. To effectively cater to the needs of these accounts, marketers need to gather customer data to understand the needs and preferences of the individuals associated with these accounts.

Once this data has been gathered, it can be analyzed to identify trends and patterns that will prove to be useful for account-based marketing. By gathering and analyzing customer data, brands can optimize their marketing strategy to better meet the needs and preferences of their target accounts.

Data-Driven Marketing Case Studies

Every strategy claiming to be beneficial for your company needs some solid, real-life examples to back it up. Delve AI has been at the forefront of helping companies make measurable marketing gains. Let us look at some marketing success stories that have implemented data-driven strategies.

Website personas for APT Global

APT Global is a technical service provider in the Marine, Dredging, Offshore, Oil & Gas, and Construction sectors. They are engaged in shipbuilding and repair, offshore wind installations, offshore oil rig repair services, and a host of other engineering services. Their headquarters are in Dubai with various operations in the UAE, Qatar, India, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Taiwan.

APT Global signed up for Website Persona by Delve AI, intending to increase their sales figures. Website Persona creates personas for businesses by analyzing their website data and enriching it with social media and VoC data. The persona was further optimized by including visit alerts, smart routing, and lead prioritization.

Ultimately, by leveraging the data provided by the website persona, APT Global managed to quicken its sales cycle. The persona identified and eliminated competitors and other non-consumer users from the website visitors' prospects list, thereby managing to improve the sales cycle efficiency. APT Global could also successfully identify potential investors visiting their website using the data provided by the persona.

Brand personas for Bask Suncare

Bask Suncare is a Miami-based company offering sunscreen products. Their mission centers on creating non-oily SPF formulas that ensure better skin protection. Bask emphasizes clean ingredients, avoiding parabens and sulfates, and focuses on sustainable sources to ensure both skin safety and environmental responsibility.

Bask signed up for Persona by Delve AI to learn more about its diverse audience and to identify which were the best-performing segments. Using the data provided, their marketing campaigns were refined with content that resonated with the lifestyles, needs, values, and interests of their customer segments.

With the data provided by the brand personas, Bask was able to fine-tune its marketing efforts to cater to the needs of every customer segment, which resulted in improved customer satisfaction and increased brand loyalty. Using data-driven insights, Bask was able to focus its marketing efforts on the right segments, thereby reducing wastage.

AI personas for Super Butcher

Super Butcher is an Australian family-owned business. They focus on bringing Australia’s best products to their customers’ doorsteps. Their products range from branded beef to pork, lamb, and chicken, which are sourced from Australia's best producers. They have 9 stores across Queensland.

Super Butcher wanted to increase customer engagement as well as overall sales. Several buyer personas were created representing each customer segment using the AI Persona Generator by Delve AI. It was seen that males aged 24 to 54 formed the core demographic of the company. Females aged 24 to 50 were the major demographic when it came to online shopping.

These insights were particularly useful for creating customized data-driven marketing campaigns.

• Through data-driven persona creation, Super Butcher was able to attain higher conversion rates of 4.5% on emails for online purchases and 6-7% on emails for in-store purchases.
• There was also a 29% improvement in email click-through rate.
• Existing customers spent 50% more than newly acquired customers, in return for incentives/discounts.

Wrapping Up

In today’s data-led world, data-driven marketing is the new norm, and data-driven marketers are an irreplaceable asset to any company. Modern marketing that is rooted in data has numerous advantages over traditional forms of marketing. It helps you to better know your customers and create personalized products and services, along with tailor-made marketing campaigns.

Without relevant data, you are left shooting in the dark. Your marketing approach will be like trying to steer a ship with a broken rudder: with no sense of direction and going wherever the wind takes you. To give your sales and marketing strategy a clear sense of direction, you need to be cognizant of crucial market trends and customer preferences.

There are multiple marketing tools at your disposal, like personas, advisor tools, and web analytics software. There are also numerous real-life examples of brands that have successfully leveraged the capabilities of data-driven marketing. It is up to you to make the best use of all the utilities at your fingertips to bring your A-game to your company.