A Guide to Data-Driven Marketing Strategy | FieldRoutes

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The rise of big data, AI, and digital marketing makes this trend much more relevant in today’s competitive landscape. And it’s not just trendy—it’s making an impact on bottom lines as well. Because by utilizing data, marketers can craft incredible experiences that can lead to more sales and conversions.

What is Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing uses customer information and sales data to make marketing messages more targeted and relevant. This, in turn, can help marketing campaigns have higher retention and engagement—all while minimizing costs.

A perfect example of data-driven marketing is personalization. For example, say your lawn care company wants to send customers a birthday card on their big day with a discounted offer for services. The ability to do this relies on having the correct data on that customer.

What Are the Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing?

It’s no secret that data is taking over nearly all aspects of modern business. This is especially relevant in marketing, as consumer expectations continue to rise and companies are using marketing data to not only target the right audience, but tailor their messaging to that audience.

While there are many benefits to data-driven marketing, here are some of our top favorites:

They Deliver Relevant And Personalized Messages

One of the most powerful tactics you can unlock with marketing data is personalization. But unlocking the true power of this tactic requires more than just knowing basic details like name and location.

With strategic data-driven marketing, you’ll have access to a customer’s preferences and behaviors—allowing you to send marketing messages aligned with their needs. You can even predict the best time to send them an offer, increasing the chance that they’ll respond.

For instance, field service businesses can use data based on a customer’s history to determine which offers to show them. Perhaps it’s been a couple of weeks since they had their lawn serviced, presenting an opportunity to show you’re thinking about them by sending a reminder.

Relevant messages improve the odds that customers will respond to your marketing. There’s less risk of sending annoying, spammy emails that will put your company in a bad light. Most importantly, personalization shows customers you “get them” and care for their needs.

It Allows You To Segment Your Market

The foundation of personalization and relevant marketing is knowing your customers inside and out. And that is something that only data can give you.

Marketing data allows you to segment your users based on their customer journey. You should never send generic messages to everyone because each customer will have different needs at various stages. This is especially crucial for field service companies, who offer multiple services.

Segmentation is important for sending relevant messages to your prospects. But it’s also crucial for efficient marketing spend. It ensures you don’t waste money offering something to customers who are unlikely to be interested. Most of all, segmentation can help organize your marketing efforts.

For example, if termite season is approaching, don’t spam all your customers with an offer. Those who have used your services recently will feel annoyed or worse. It makes it seem as though you didn’t even know they used your services at all. Customers want to feel valued and appreciated, not spammed in their inbox with money-grabbing efforts. A more target approach on the other hand can keep your message relevant to those who have not already purchased services.

It Allows You To Fine-Tune Your Marketing Strategy

With customer data, marketing becomes less of a guessing game. Each decision will be based on live feedback from the market, increasing your odds of success.

For instance, data-driven advertising enables efficient ad buying. It gives you insights into the right ad length, placement, impressions, format, frequency, and even the ideal ad spend. You can also utilize demographic data like location, age and interests to target users accurately.

If you’re not sure where to invest yet, you can run multiple campaigns and analyze the numbers to determine which gives the best ROI.

Data also informs you which marketing channels your customers are responding to. For instance, if you find your Facebook posts are getting much more traction than your Instagram marketing, you’ll know where to double down on your efforts.

Data is important because you’ll know what’s working in the market and what’s not. This knowledge makes your campaign much more consistent and predictable.

It Helps Improve Your Conversion Rate

Getting more leads to convert is a comprehensive effort that begins as early as service development—and data is invaluable throughout the process.

For instance, marketers often discover consumer needs by gathering data through surveys and interviews. Knowing your audience’s pain points and goals will help you align your products and services toward that, thus creating something your customers will want.

But having the right product isn’t enough; you also need to market it properly. Fortunately, if you already have the data, it’s all you need to create “buzz” for your offer.

For instance, you can craft data-driven messaging that taps into your target market’s needs—like a complete guide for lawn maintenance. Building authority and providing resources creates a desire for your services because people can clearly see the value you’re offering, improving your conversion rates immensely.

Putting customer data at the heart of your marketing ensures that you always know how to effectively communicate with your audience.

You Can Deliver Excellent Customer Experiences

Probably the most important benefit a data-driven marketing company can reap is gaining users’ trust. Through data, you can deliver the best customer experience.

For instance, going through reviews and feedback lets you know what you need to work on in your marketing or offer. Maybe the data tells you that you’re sending too many offers via email. Perhaps your prices are a little higher than the local competition. Whether the feedback is positive or negative, respond and engage with the customer.

Acting on this feedback is very powerful. First, it shows customers that you’re listening. Second, it can reverse even negative feedback and salvage your relationship with an unsatisfied customer.

The Most Common Data-Driven Marketing Challenges

Nothing is perfect, and there are challenges to data-driven marketing. Here are some of the most common obstacles you may face while implementing this strategy:

Data Gathering

This is perhaps the number one roadblock for companies that want to maximize their data. However, the problem typically isn’t a lack of data, but inefficient methods to gather them. Therefore, the key to solving this issue is to focus on data gathering systems.

For instance, you can use data analytics solutions to automatically pull data from various sources (social media, sales figures, website analytics, etc.) into one convenient location. This also ensures you’re getting the most up-to-date information at all times.

Data Silos

Gathering data can also expose another problem—data silos. This refers to how data is stored in multiple locations throughout the organization. For example, financial data might be with the accounting department, while sales data will always stay with sales.

The problem with silos is that it can make unifying data difficult. A common solution is to have a data warehouse in your organization that stores everything in one location.

Data Teams

Handling and processing data is a 24/7 task that requires a dedicated team (or at least one data expert). Companies that are just starting to become data-driven might not have one on their payroll. Regardless of the added hiring costs, having someone responsible for the company’s data is vital. If hiring a new person isn’t an option, perhaps these duties can be added to an existing employee who has a knack for numbers.

4 Ways To Create A Successful Data-Driven Marketing Strategy

The benefits of data-driven marketing far outweigh the challenges. Here are four ways to get started creating a data-driven marketing strategy.

Use Data To Identify Your Goals

Data-driven marketing, like everything else in your business, should align with your organization’s goals. To start off, identify why you want to do data-driven marketing in the first place. For instance, if your goal is to double your revenue this year, what data-driven strategies do you think can employ? This method ensures that every decision you make will fulfill that goal.

Defining S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals might be cliché, but there’s a reason this goal-setting technique is so effective. A data-based and S.M.A.R.T. goal-driven strategy can help you craft much more realistic and effective campaigns.

More importantly, they tell you how you’ll know you’ve hit those targets. S.M.A.R.T. goals will lead to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which are the metrics you should measure your marketing against. KPIs not only give you the destination, but they also allow you to clearly identify your baseline.

S.M.A.R.T. goals and KPIs give data-driven marketing its foundation and momentum.

Set A Data-Based Marketing Budget

Asking for the right marketing budget is perhaps one of the most important ingredients for success. Unfortunately, many marketers don’t do it right.

It’s important to look at it from a bigger picture perspective—it’s all a numbers game. Naturally, you’ll want to allot resources to things that will give the biggest return. And the best way to prove this is with data.

Gathering data is your best-case study to argue for a bigger budget. You can show how every dollar you spent in your marketing campaign returned a specific ROI. The bottom line is that data should be your main tool for negotiating a bigger cut from the organization’s budget.

Align With Your Customer’s Journey

The customer journey is an important tool you should maximize. It’s a framework that breaks down “where” the customer is at their buying stage. It’s composed of three steps: awareness, consideration, and decision. People are generally less informed in the early stages and more empowered to make a purchase decision in the latter.

As a result, your marketing message should be different at each buying stage. For people in the awareness stage, your marketing should be focused on education—hard selling is a bad idea here. Buyers on the decision stage, on the other hand, are already 95% there and just need a subtle push to purchase. Customer retention and direct offers work best here.

You should actively gather data from each person to determine where they are in this journey. This eliminates the risk of a marketing message mismatch, which is guaranteed to confuse or annoy your prospects.

Data on your sales cycle is also vital so you can align it with the customer journey. This is essential for offering seasonal services.

Utilize Data Everywhere In Your Marketing

For the most consistent and effective marketing, data should be uniformly applied in all of your marketing efforts. For instance, if you use data to personalize your ads, it also makes sense to tailor-fit it for your emails. This approach creates a cohesive and seamless experience for the user.

Retargeting is a particularly powerful application of marketing data. It involves sending people who have already visited your website or Facebook page a relevant offer. For instance, if a customer viewed a particular service on your site, you can use that data to show them a related service in other channels.

Data is also great for creating relevant promotions or contests. A pest control company, for example, can run a discount promotion on mosquito services in the summer.

Experience The Power Of Data With FieldRoutes

Field service businesses need data-driven marketing as much as any industry, which is where the FieldRoutes™ Marketing Suite steps up. Our Cloud-based marketing solution for lawn care and pest control companies helps you gather more insights and data from your audience.

If you’re in need of pest control software or lawn care software, partner with FieldRoutes. Our robust solutions were designed for businesses like yours. From managing your sales to getting high-quality leads, we can utilize that data to improve your bottom line.

Contact us today or schedule a free demo

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