Today businesses, brands, and advertisers are in constant competition to find an edge over one another; there is a continuous strive for a niche consumer acquisition and influence their behavioural choices and decision towards a particular product or services.
Consumers are traditionally intuitive beings. Their emotions sway their decisions. Business marketing models previously harped upon intuitions and feelings to attract audiences.
Intuitive and emotional marketing, even today, works to some extent, but it will be foolish to make a strategy based upon these two fluctuating indexes. E.g., a product designed for women may only have a small market amongst upper-class women and may ultimately fail if introduced to middle-class women. But how will the business decision to make a category of new products for the other category audience? Of course, by the number of sales made through the marketing of the product.
Here the role of data analytics comes into the picture of business and marketing decisions.
Data-driven business decisions give organisations an invaluable insight to market themselves and communicate the way their audience wants to.
These days, businesses are competing to grab the attention span of the audience.
The digital boom has been both a boon and a bane for marketing and advertising. It is a competition where impressions can be hard to make in the audience’s minds. Still, there is the availability of tools to understand your consumer and their behaviour, hence shaping it to the advantage of your business through data analysis.
Data-driven business strategies in the digital age show the real-time truth of consumer patterns and embark upon the following actions for improved operations. Data collection can be in various forms, such as: analysing demographics, customer reviews and feedback, engagement on social media, product testing etc.
The collection of these data can be either descriptive, presumptive, or prescriptive. The big data-driven models can be applied to businesses of any size to invent their marketing strategies in the digital age.
According to a report published by Google’s chief strategist, Neil Hoyne remarked that in the digital age, “the companies that are going to win are the ones who are using data, not the pens that are guessing.” McKenzie group seconds this theory by stating that data-driven companies are the ones that can retain their customers by six times and are nineteen times more profitable.
Benefits of data-driven business marketing and advertising decisions
In the digital world, data analytics help businesses to build a virtual relationships with consumers. It also improves the company’s growth, but most importantly, it impacts the internal and external strategies and decisions of any business. It opens up avenues through the following ways:
1) Predicting Audience Engagement
The data derived from how a customer engages with your product on social media or through any marketing funnel help your business decide what the customer prefers.
Through this data, advertisers test their social media ads. This determines their behavioural patterns. For instance, Netflix introduced their mobile screen subscription after analysing that youths primarily consume content through their phones and not on laptops or desktops. This group audience’s behaviour helped Netflix increase their sales by pushing influencer ads to promote the new subscription model.
2) Growth and Performance
Data analytics is evidence-driven to examine the performance of an employee or the growth of the company. It helps to formulate strategies of improvements such as boosting the employees’ skillset, altering marketing actions to promote a product, understanding sales patterns etc. Data analytics can also save operational costs as the IT department of organisations handles customer queries, internal budgeting, inventory mapping etc.
3) Customer Acquisition and Retention
Without acquiring new customers and retaining a pool of loyal ones, the marketing strategies of any business will fail. Top organisations’ chief marketing officers decide their marketing plans based on customer acquisition data derived through customer insights and research.
Even if a customer engages with your ad, it does not mean conversions will take place.
Through insights into demography and gender, engagement patterns determine the target audience’s preference and prepare the next set of marketing actions to convert the potential leads into loyal customers.
4) Targeted and Personalized Advertising
Consumers’ demography, gender, social culture, and most importantly, purchasing power determine whether they will choose a product or a service. Data analytics gives a real insight into such aspects to improve targeted marketing strategies. Businesses may offer discounts to cater to middle-income groups or may introduce a new product to acquire these consumers. Data helps businesses understand their audience and personalities and leverage it to influence their decisions through personalised advertisement.
For eg, Whisper will put out social media ads for their women consumers only and showcase the new products through empowered messaging. This will encourage women to buy menstrual health products from Whisper only as it caters to their needs as personalises just for them.
5) Gaining visibility
Data-driven strategies help businesses promote their product through ad placements across platforms where their target audiences are present. It helps to gain and constantly put itself on the radar of the niche audience.
6) Changing data models according to situational demands
The ROI of marketing efforts built on the data insights of consumers drastically changed in 2020 with the arrival of the pandemic. In this uncertain situation, consumer patterns also shifted, making previous data insights redundant.
Businesses are now using predictive data models in their marketing strategies to influence consumer decisions.
Dettol understood that surface contact spreads the virus; hence, this predicted data helped them market their surface disinfectants accordingly.
Conclusion
Data analytics helps businesses to take authentic actions. Rather than hitting on blind spots, they can avoid losses through data insights on which marketing method is working and how it can boost sales. It is the blueprint to determine the ROI on marketing efforts and build the organisational foundation of having loyal customers who can organically be the spokesperson of your product and services.
