How to Excel in Data-Driven Marketing and Online Sales Generation

A recent Corporate Executive Board study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the vast majority of marketers still rely too much on intuition and those that use data for marketing purposes do it badly. Read further on how to excel in data-driven marketing.

Econsultancy gives four tips on how to use data-driven marketing on the path to conversion:

1.Gather the right data
The challenge of big data is how to reduce it down to the level at which it is applied to the individual customer. You need to know your audience’s values, identities, and needs, and how your brand fits (or does not fit) into these.

2.Think omni-channel and use contextualization to your advantage
Once you have identified your customers’ values and needs, ensure that you are supporting engagement and greater customer experiences across channels.

3.Aim for real–time and seize the conversion opportunity
How fast can you react to analytics data? If it takes you more than a day to launch a new campaign and contextualise it based on browser behaviour, you’ve missed the boat.

4.Smart content for improved speed
Ecommerce sites have been working with smart content for a long time, and it is time that we embrace that in order to improve speed and agility for other sites as well.

These are great tips, however, I think it starts with the first point, gather the right data and combine it in such a way (second point) that you can accurately analyze how performance is created and where actually the bottlenecks are.

Throughout my consulting years and e-commerce experience I created this ‘mental’ model of different dimensions that impact the performance, but also offered me data-derived creativity to look for ways to optimize it that would not have struck me without understanding relationships between different dimensions.

How the three dimensions interrelate:

  1. A company cannot achieve optimal results if the website and/or other digital assets and channels are optimized but the brand and products are not competitive, not differentiated well enough and so on. (Think of back-office data, CRM, product data such as margins, velocity rates, brand recognition, brand equity, brand awareness etc)
  2. A company cannot achieve optimal results if the website and brand/products are optimized but the channels that deliver traffic to the website and/or other digital assets are underperforming.
  3. A company cannot achieve optimal results if the brand/products and channels are optimized but the website and/or other digital assets that offers these products are underperforming.

The above relationships between the dimenions and goal are perhaps obvious, but often the focus and cause was put on multichannel marketing or digital assets and not so much on the products offered by the company.

Do you create a holistic view on your data-driven marketing and online sales to effectively act upon it?