In today’s time, you might have heard about data-driven marketing and got curious about how exactly it works. However, for many beginners, it may not look as simple as it sounds. In fact, you might even have difficulty in finding data, data-driven tools and using them for analyzing the data for marketing purposes. So, to help you out, let’s take an in-depth look into what exactly is data-driven marketing, and how beneficial it is.

What is Data-Driven Marketing and How Does Data Drive Internet Marketing?

As the name suggests, data-driven marketing is all about using customer data to optimize and analyze brand communications.
For instance, a brand may use its customer data to understand the requirements and needs of its customers to bring out suitable marketing strategies. Thus, helping them gain more profits as well as customer loyalty.

But, how exactly can data drive internet marketing? To understand this, let’s understand the differences between traditional marketing and data-driven marketing.
In traditional marketing, everything is mostly based on predictions and assumptions with the help of case studies. For example, the customer’s needs and wants. As you can see, this method is purely trial and error.

On the other hand, when you have the actual customer data of the target audience, you can analyze it and then, use it for developing marketing strategies. Thus, in this, there’s almost no risk of the strategies failing.

So, when it comes to internet marketing, the same method is applied wherein the customer data is used to show the customers exactly what they need.

Benefits of Using Data to Drive Internet Marketing

Moving on to the benefits, how exactly can data help in internet marketing? Here’s the answer:

1. Understand the Target Audience More Clearly

Sometimes, you might know who your target audience is but you might not exactly know what they want.
In such a situation, any form of data can help you understand your target audience in a much clear way. Thus, helping your marketing campaigns reach your audience at the correct time and in the correct way!

2. Building Better Customer Relations

For any brand, building customer relations is a must. Well, data-driven marketing can totally help with that!
When you have customer data, you can understand your audience in a better way. This can help in increasing customer engagement. This engagement can increase brand-customer relations too.

3. Knowing Where to Promote

In order to promote your brand, you require some platforms for carrying out the promotions. Now, depending on the trends, the preferred platform of the customers might change.
So, when you have gathered all the customer data, you can also know which is the most preferred platform today. This can help you promote your brand across that platform and help you reach a wider audience.

4. Personalized Marketing

There is no denying the fact that irrelevant marketing tactics can actually drive the audience away from you. Hence, you’re simply putting in your efforts to market your services but you aren’t actually getting anything in return. In this case, personalizing the services may help brands. Now, this can easily be achieved with the help of customer data. It is because when you have the data, you can understand the preferences as well as trigger points of the customers. This can help you in personalizing the overall marketing technique and gain customer trust.
All these benefits easily show how advantageous data-driven marketing actually is!

Challenges of Data-Driven Marketing

As mentioned above, data-driven marketing isn’t easy. There’s a lot you need to know and analyze in order to get things right. In fact, as per Campaign Monitor, 81% of marketers find data-driven marketing to be quite complicated.

Given below are some of the challenges with data-driven marketing.

1. Fear of Gathering Data

Before you dive into the world of data-driven marketing, you might feel scared of gathering customer data.
The questions like where, how, and which can get any marketer confused when it comes to collecting data. This may cause them to drop the idea of data-driven marketing itself.
However, there are many ways to gather data. For instance, you can consider your CRM, ERP system, website analytics, social media analytics, and many more to gather personalized data.

2. Managing and Storing Data

Even after you have collected the data, you need to manage it well. For example, it is necessary to update the data as regularly as possible to market your services well. Now, this can get quite challenging! Storing data may also get tedious in the case of data silos. Due to this, the organization may not be able to make up most of the data gathered. This could lead to inefficiency in marketing techniques.

3. Building An Efficient Team

In order to collect, analyze, and process an abundance of data, you definitely need a specialized and efficient team. So, finding a data expert may get a little tricky for some brands too.
However, you can easily overcome these challenges if you dig in a little deeper when it comes to data-driven internet marketing.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, data can definitely help internet marketing enthusiasts to reach their target audience along with building stronger relations with them.
Moreover, there are a few data-driven marketing tools like Tableau, Azure and Power BI, and Google Data Studio that can help you out.