Data-Driven Marketing For Beginners: Your How-To Guide Welcome to Latana’s Guide to Data-Driven Marketing for Beginners! Your marketing strategy shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. While a "spray and pray" approach was normal in the past, brands these days can and should be more targeted in how they address their customers. Part of what makes brands such as Amazon, Airbnb, and Spotify so successful is their innovative use of data and machine-learning algorithms. Deeply understanding their target audience has provided them with a significant competitive advantage, blowing their traditional counterparts out of the water. With a data-driven approach, you can invest your precious budget in content and campaigns that truly resonate with your audience, building trust and loyal customers. Today, 56% of consumers think brands require a deeper understanding of their needs. As people expect more personalized experiences, the shift towards data-driven marketing has become even more pronounced. This, however, is offset by growing data privacy concerns, which marketers need to navigate. Learn how and why data-driven marketing is changing the way brand managers approach campaigns and content — and how you too can build a better marketing strategy using data. Enjoy! Introduction What Is Data-Driven Marketing & Why Is it Important? Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing How To Build a Data-Driven Approach Examples of Data-Driven Marketing (Programmatic, Remarketing, Weather-Based Marketing & Brand Tracking) Data-Driven Marketing Tools Data-Driven Marketing Trends and Best Practices The Skills Your Team Needs For Data-Driven Marketing Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 * C h a p t e r C h a p t e r C h a p t e r C h a p t e r C h a p t e r C h a p t e r B O N U S C h a p t e r What Is Data-Driven Marketing & Why Is it Important? 1 C h a p t e r Data-driven marketing means using analytics and statistics to guide your brand’s advertising and communication strategy, instead of relying on unvalidated assumptions and gut feelings. A data-driven approach can help you make better decisions in a variety of marketing-related areas, including? = Identifying which audiences to targeA = Designing and testing creative asset- = Showing different creatives to different audience- = Deciding which market to launch in nexA = Figuring out which channels to be present o9 = Selecting topics to write content about And many more... What Is Data-Driven Marketing? Marketing is all about getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time. The best way to do that is by using data. Using customer data to guide your marketing strategy will help you reach people likely to be interested in your product or service, in a way that feels relevant to them. For example, a data-driven marketer at a local coffee chain might notice, based on their internal sales data, that their female customers are grabbing a coffee-to-go in the mornings. So, they launch a new morning coffee blend and run a Facebook campaign targeting women in the local area, aged 28-45, between 6 am and 9 am. Rather than targeting “everyone who drinks coffee”, the brand used data to figure out who is likely to be interested in their product. This way, they can set their ads to reach only relevant people. In addition, they can adapt their messaging and visuals to appeal to that particular target audience. Facebook and other platforms offer highly-precise targeting - but that is only helpful if you actually know who you want to reach (check out our Ultimate Guide to Target Audiences for more information). Otherwise, you will waste your budget advertising to people who are never going to buy from you. A data-driven approach is more likely to yield a positive ROI than guesses or gut feelings. You have more control over your advertising budget and can show your target audience messages which tap into their specific emotions and pain points. This will usually lead to higher engagement and more conversions compared to generic ads. Why Is Data-Driven Marketing Important? DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING USER A USER B USER C A B C 75% 50% 25% Benefits Of Data-Driven Marketing 2 C h a p t e r Data-driven marketing offers significant benefits for marketers and brand managers. In this chapter we will discuss how data can help you with this. Pet Owner High Education High Income 23% 10% 62% Urban Millennials 14% Identify Relevant Audiences One of the biggest mistakes you can make is thinking that your target audience is “everybody”. Your customer base is most likely composed of people who share the same or similar characteristics. What traits do your most loyal customers have in common? Concentrate on reaching more people like them! Using data to uncover high-value customer groups is the cornerstone of data-driven marketing. Brand tracking software such as Latana can identify relevant customer cohorts as well as high-potential new audiences that your company might not have data on yet. Demographic data Age Gender Location Job Needs Interests behavioral data Tailor and Personalize Your Communication 80% of people say they are much more likely to buy a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences. Demographic data such as age, gender, job, and location reveal a lot about a person’s needs and interests. Behavior-based data, such as the pages a user viewed on your site, shows their specific intent at a given time. Marketers can use insights from both demographic and behavioral data to tailor the design and messaging so that the ad is more likely to resonate with the target audience. For example, if you run a travel agency, you can retarget website visitors who looked up flights to Rome, Paris, and Hongkong with relevant ads tailored to the city they showed interest in. This is more likely to resonate than generic ads promoting flights to random places, or targeting users who aren’t planning on traveling in the near future. Test and Validate Creative Ideas If you and your colleague can’t agree on an email subject line, or you aren’t sure which visuals will appeal most to your target audience, you can run an A/B test, also known as a split test, to find out. Testing removes any subjective guesswork. After all, you are not your target audience. Just because you like the ad copy, image or video, doesn’t mean your audience will! Running regular tests on email subject lines, or social media visuals, can provide a wealth of insights and optimize your marketing performance. Create the Perfect Customer Journey Is your website fast to load? Which of your web pages have the highest bounce rates? Mapping out the customer journey across all touchpoints and determining where users drop off can help fix any issues and increase your conversion rate. For instance, if you are running an eCommerce store and you notice that lots of users drop off at the checkout phase, your hypothesis might be that high delivery costs are scaring potential customers off. So you could try offering free delivery for first-time customers and measure the impact on your conversion rate. Invest Your Budget Wisely You might think that Tik Tok is really cool right now, or that your company should run a campaign in Brazil. But does the data support that? Chances are you do not have the resources to be everywhere, all the time, so data can help you set priorities and justify your choices internally to key stakeholders. The combined benefits of data-driven marketing are likely to result in higher engagement, improved brand perception, and, ultimately, more ROI from your marketing campaigns. How To Build A Data-Driven Approach 3 C h a p t e r Now, you should have a good understanding of the benefits a data-driven approach can bring to your marketing. But what’s the best way to get started? Let’s take a look at how and where you can successfully infuse data into your marketing strategy. While becoming truly data-driven requires a mindset shift that won’t happen overnight, it will ultimately lead to better marketing results and higher ROI. Getting started is easier than you think, so let’s dive in! S T E P Define Key Objectives Having clearly defined goals is a must. What are you setting out to achieve? This way, you can figure out the type of information you need to collect and where to get it from, and later you will be able to tell if your initiative was a success. 1 S T E P Choose Data Sources and Collect Data Whether it’s brand performance data from Latana, keyword data from the Google Search Console, or CRM data from Hubspot, the next step is to collect the data you need. 2 S T E P Gain Insights Through Data Analysis Data by itself doesn’t provide value – but the insights hidden within the data are worth their weight in gold. Can you spot any trends? Maybe some customer groups are more profitable than others, or maybe certain search terms have become more popular. Combing through your data can be time-consuming, but your new-found deeper understanding of your customers will be worth it! 3 S T E P Create Your Strategy Now it’s time to turn insights into strategy. If you have identified one particularly active consumer group, you might decide to make them the focus of your next campaign. This will mean, at a minimum, creating assets tailored to their interests and needs and being present on the channels where they hang out. 4 S T E P Launch Your Campaign With your data-driven strategy in place, it is now time to go live with your campaign. 5 S T E P Optimize the Performance A truly data-driven marketer will constantly strive for improved performance, even if the results are already pretty good. The handy thing about digital marketing is that unlike, say, a print brochure or direct mail, it’s quite easy to make changes during your campaign. That means you have the opportunity to fix anything that isn’t working and double-down on the tactics that are bringing results. It’s important to take the entire user journey into account. Let’s say your ads are getting lots of clicks. Sounds good, right? However, if the traffic is not converting - that is to say, not performing any 6 valuable actions on your website, like making a purchase or signing up for a demo - then you might need to optimize your landing page. Is it too slow and users are getting frustrated? Or is the messaging unclear and they don’t understand what you’re offering them? Optimization is a continuous process, not a one-time thing. The best data-driven marketers are always learning, testing, and refining their strategy. For example, if you are running a Facebook campaign in the US, UK, and Germany, and your conversion rate is lower in Germany, you might decide to test a different ad copy better suited to the local market. Or, if one of your Google Search Ads has an exceptionally click-through-rate, you could test the same headline on Facebook. The possibilities are endless! S T E P Report and Analyze The final step is to create a report or dashboard showcasing the results and go through the insights and learnings. This will help guide your strategy next time. 7 Examples Of Data-Driven Marketing 4 C h a p t e r Let’s take at the most common types of data-driven marketing and how top brands leverage them to boost marketing ROI. These examples will inspire you to adopt a data-driven approach in your own marketing mix. Programmatic advertising is a way of targeting different audiences on a wide variety of websites, rather than one audience on one site. Targeting is typically based on demographic data, such as age and gender, or interests and purchase intent, based on the user’s browsing behavior. This is different from traditional ad buying, where you agree to run a set number of ads with a specific publisher. Instead of reaching, say, everyone who visits the New York Times website, you can show your ads to select audiences all over the web. One effective example is from the Amanda Foundation, a nonprofit Animal Rescue. They used demographics and browser history data to introduce animals in need to potential owners via programmatic banner ads. For example, bookworms might be matched with cats, whereas outdoors lovers might be shown an athletic dog. Using data, the nonprofit organization was able to bring together pets and animal lovers in a highly personalized way. Programmatic Advertising E X A M p l e Remarketing enables you to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app. It is a popular eCommerce tactic to reduce shopping cart abandonment by promoting products the user added to the cart but did not purchase. Remarketing is also an effective way of reminding customers of their desire to engage with your brand and can help push customers through to the next step of the conversion funnel. Let’s take a look at Airbnb, a popular hospitality travel site and app which excels at remarketing. They use Facebook and Instagram to reach users who have already started researching vacation destinations on the Airbnb website. By grabbing the “low hanging fruit” – users who have already demonstrated clear purchase intent – they were able to drive more bookings, tripling their Facebook ad ROI. Not too bad, right? REMARKETING E X A M p l e