90% of US customers find personalized marketing content to be extremely attractive, and are more likely to convert when their needs are discussed in your communications. If your marketing strategy isn’t data-driven, then you are depending on your hunch, that’s not a smart business strategy.

Most marketers are slowly shifting to relying on using data to create marketing strategies. A marketing team that doesn’t concentrate on data to create its marketing strategy will have a tough time appealing to its audience and making sales. With the help of relevant data, businesses will be able to develop strategies that will bring the prospective customer deeper into their sales funnel. By having a one-size-fits-all strategy that doesn’t take into account the data of your customers, you are doing your marketing campaigns a great disservice.

The data that we are referring to are data-points collected based on customer interactions and from other sources. They can help you refine your audience, improve the odds of success of your marketing strategies, and give you a better understanding of what customers want and expect from you. Keeping this in mind while drafting your strategy can result in path-breaking results if you’ve never used data to offer personalized marketing strategies.

Here is how you can use data to personalize your marketing campaigns:

#1 Have a clear objective:

To create a highly successful data-driven marketing campaign, you need to be sure about your objective. Having clear goals will help you figure out which data to collect. There will be truckloads of data that you can source through different channels, but you do not need all of them. If your goal is to refine your target audience, then knowing who visits your website, data of your existing customers and that of your competitors, buying behaviour, etc., will be relevant.

#2 Know your target audience:

One of the most important things about marketing is that not everyone is your prospective customer. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses don’t get this simple logic. “The more the merrier” isn’t the kind of motto that will help you run successful marketing campaigns. The narrower your target, the more likely you are to reach out to your ideal audience. It is better to reach 1000 of your targeted prospects than 1 million random people, no matter which channel it is.

#3 Choose the right data:

For data-driven marketing campaigns to work, you need to ensure that you collect relevant data. Collect all the first-party data that is available about your customers through internal sources. Go for second-party data which will act as a supplement for your first-party data.

The data that you collect should depend on your marketing objectives. Do you want more people to visit your website? Do you want them to share their contact information with the help of a lead magnet? Are you looking to increase your followers list on social media? Or do you want more sales? More upsells and cross-sells?

Collect data from each interaction touchpoint. It will help you understand what your customers want and how they are behaving based on which stage of the customer journey they are in. Once you have a grasp of your customer journey, you will be able to proactively guide them based on the next action you want them to take, thereby personalizing their experience.

#4 Use the right channels:

While there are a variety of marketing channels that you can use to reach out to your customers, dipping your hands on each of them won’t help. You need to concentrate on your efforts for the channels that are most relevant to your business. If you are a small business, then investing in billboards will not make economic sense to you. It costs a lot of money and the ones reading the billboards might not necessarily walk into your store.

Find out where your customers lurk usually. Make a list of the places where they are most likely to consume your content and engage with it. Factor in other considerations also before you prepare a unique strategy for each channel. Please do remember that each channel works differently. What might be popular on Instagram wouldn’t be an advisable strategy for Quora. So you need to choose the right channels and engage appropriately.

#5 Create personalized content:

After getting all the above right, the next step is to produce content that hits the nail on the head. Each piece of content you create should bring the prospect closer to becoming your customer. Distribute the content you write to the marketing channels. As your audience keeps consuming your content, they will feel closer to your brand and will be more trusting of your products and services.

#6 Measure Measure Measure:

Unless you know how your campaign is performing across each metrics, you will never be able to understand how effective or ineffective it is. As a marketer, your aim should be to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. For this, you need to consider your first campaign as a benchmark and use the subsequent ones to measure your progress.

If you observe that a particular strategy hasn’t been fetching results for a few months, then do not think twice about pivoting it. With each campaign, you will have more data, use them to refine your marketing strategy.

Conclusion:

Thanks to a myriad of tools, businesses can create content that appeals personally to each of their audience. By using data effectively, you can come up with marketing campaigns for different types of personas. 87% of marketers believe that data is one of their most-underutilized assets. Do not let the treasure trove that is customer data go waste.

By leveraging data and information about your customers, you can send them incredibly useful information with the help of targeted email campaigns. If you are looking to use the services of an email marketing automation platform, Adapt.io can help you. Get in touch with our customer success team and we will tell you how we can help your business.