There are a variety of strategies that companies use to improve their marketing campaign and attract more leads to their business. But most would agree that data-driven marketing, especially for B2B companies, is a necessity for a successful campaign. Data-driven marketing can encompass a lot of different strategies and tactics, that aren’t always easy to apply to a business. That’s why it’s helpful to have a strong understanding of how a data-driven marketing campaign works and the best way to implement one for your business.
Why Use Data-Driven Marketing for B2B?
Data-driven marketing uses key insights and information to make your marketing more efficient and effective compared to traditional marketing methods. It allows you to develop a marketing strategy with a more focused and targeted approach to achieve the highest ROI possible.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to conduct a content marketing campaign to target businesses in your trading area and drive them to your website. Without data, you might be somewhat successful at creating industry-specific content of interest to your prospects. But by using data, you can develop content you know your audience is searching for and attract them to your site more quickly and effectively.
But outside of creating compelling content, there are even more benefits to developing and implementing a data-driven marketing campaign, including:
- Knowing Your Target Audience: Data can help you uncover more about your target audience and help you develop content and advertising materials that will attract them more easily.
- Making More Informed Decisions: Using the right data can help you see where you may be lacking or falling short in your marketing efforts. You can then make more informed decisions to create a strong marketing campaign and improve your results.
- Generating Higher-Quality Leads: The right information can tell you who’s already looking for products or services that you offer. That helps you generate higher-quality leads to improve your marketing performance and increase your sales.
Because of these benefits and because data is directly related to measuring a marketing campaign’s performance, data-driven marketing has become very popular over the last decade. In fact, 76% of marketers base their decisions on data analytics.
How Does Data-Driven Marketing Work?
Data-driven marketing can work a little differently for every business that’s using it. But, generally, there are three main steps involved in a how a data-driven marketing campaign works:
1. Collecting Data
Businesses first collect the data they need using data tools and services. This data might include information on their audience’s demographics, what type of content they like to consume, and where they consume it. Essentially, data collection is a more in-depth form of market research. It helps companies better understand who their clients or customers are and what they might want from their business.
2. Analyzing Data
Once a business has the data it needs, it then analyzes it to see how it might already be succeeding or falling short in its marketing goals. Businesses can also use the data to uncover new trends and marketing opportunities. That might include seeing that there’s been an upward trend in the purchasing of a certain product or brand that they sell.
They might also include seeing where their competitors are succeeding or failing and adjust their marketing strategy accordingly. For example, let’s say a dealer notices their competitors aren’t promoting a certain truck or tractor that they sell. That dealer might then reduce its advertising efforts of a similar product it sells, knowing that product might not be very popular right now, or increase its advertising efforts to pick up where its competitors are failing.
3. Implementing Data
Finally, businesses implement the data into their campaign, determining the best way to use it. From the above step, you can already see an example of implementing data when the business reduced or increased its advertising efforts of a specific truck or tractor they sell due to its competitor’s behavior. However, there are other ways businesses can implement the data and its analysis into their marketing campaign.
For instance, a business might realize that a lot of its audience prefers emails versus other forms of communication. That business might then develop an email marketing campaign to target their audience more effectively. Once a business implements the data campaign, it’s also important to monitor and track the data as the initiative continues. This can help the business see how its performing and if it needs to make changes in order to improve the results of its campaign.
Examples of Data-Driven Marketing for B2B
Here are some examples of data-driven marketing strategies that B2B companies might perform to boost their lead generation and relationship building:
Content Marketing
Content marketers use data in a variety of ways to improve the performance of their campaigns. One such way is through keyword research. When marketers conduct keyword research, they look for keywords that are popular and relevant to their marketing campaign. This allows them to develop content that will best attract their target audience. From there, content marketers also use data to understand their current search engine ranking and how much organic traffic their content is pulling in. This allows them to monitor their performance and determine if they need to adjust their content strategies.
Email Campaigns
Almost all email campaigns deal with data in some way, shape, or form. Some of that data might include personalized emails, which analyzes and applies data and information collected from audience members, to the simple understanding of how many subscribers a company has and when they signed up for the campaign. Businesses can also use email data to segment their audiences based on different factors, such as time zone, demographics, industry, and more. Segmentation can further personalize your emails and make your marketing even more effective.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing tracks, analyzes, and uses a lot of data to improve its performance. From understanding what other pages your audience follows to how often or how much they engage with the content you post, this data helps you understand how to best attract your audience on social media. When companies post advertisements on social media, the sites also provide them with data to understand who viewed and engaged with the ad to help businesses improve or maintain their advertising strategies.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising uses an abundance of data to understand what type of content your audience consumes and where you’re most likely to reach them with targeted marketing. Using a programmatic approach, you can set up what kind of audience you want to reach and how you want to reach them. Then, you let the programmatic system and its data do the rest. Businesses can generally monitor their programmatic campaign’s performance as it goes to make sure its succeeding in its goal.
Randall Reilly now offers programmatic marketing solutions that businesses can take advantage of. We develop a custom audience for your company based on buyer behavior and then pair that audience with data to perform precise targeting for your advertising efforts. During the campaign, you’ll also receive reports to help you see what sales you’ve gained or lost during the campaign to better prepare your sales team for future calls. Contact us today to see how we can help you boost your marketing campaign with programmatic solutions.
How To Implement a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
Here is a list of steps to help you develop and implement a data-driven marketing strategy:
1. Develop SMART Goals
Creating SMART goals is very effective when using a data-driven marketing approach. That’s because it allows you to measure and analyze your campaign’s performance more easily. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Basically, it’s a form of goal creation that ensures your objectives are relevant to your campaign and that you’re able to monitor them as you go.
For example, let’s say a business wants to improve their lead generation. It might set a SMART goal of increasing their lead generation by 25% over the next three months. This allows the business to measure its generation performance during that three-month period and adjust its strategies accordingly to ensure it reaches the goal.
2. Determine Your KPIs
Once you have your goals defined, it’s important to determine which key-performance indicators (KPIs) you need to monitor to track your performance. For example, let’s say you want to improve your brand equity development. There are a number of ways to ladder up to that, including organic traffic numbers, social media followers, and competitive metrics, like market share and client acquisition rate.
Knowing this, you can analyze your campaign more effectively and make changes to your marketing strategy depending on its performance. For instance, if you don’t notice a major change to any of these data sets, you might need to change your tactics for boosting your brand awareness and attracting your target audience over your competitors.
3. Find Your Data Sources
It’s not easy to track KPIs for your campaign without actual data and information. There are a number of data sources available to your business, from free ones, like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, to paid ones, such as Semrush and Ahrefs. The main thing to consider when choosing the right data source for your business is what information it offers to match your marketing goals. If your goal is to improve brand equity development, you need to ensure your data source provides you with numbers on things like market share, social media followers, and organic traffic.
Depending on the industry you operate in, some businesses offer exclusive data insights for different industries to help companies improve their marketing efforts. Randall Reilly currently offers multiple marketing solutions using our proprietary data to help target consumers in the trucking industry, agricultural industry, construction industry, and more.
We have the power and expertise to shift buyer behavior with our programmatic campaigns and generate leads through well-placed ads on our media brands. These brands, which host award-winning content, provide an excellent space for you to engage with your target audience and attract them to your business. Check out our media playbooks today to see how we can provide expert data, insights, and opportunities to boost your marketing efforts.
