Data-driven marketing is the way of the future. When marketing joins with data science to strategically leverage big data, marketers can achieve better campaign results. What does a data-driven marketing strategy entail? How can marketing teams parse through the data they are collecting to inform the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns? Our blog explains...
Table of Contents
The Origins of Data-driven Marketing
Defining a Data-driven Strategy
The Adoption of Data Science Hasn't Been Universal — Here's Why
Developing a Data-driven Campaign Strategy
Examples of Successful Data-driven Campaigns
Data-driven Marketing Campaigns: In Summary
The Origins of Data-driven Marketing
The art of marketing, and related fields like advertising and sales, evolved from the gut-feel used from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries to something more structured and fact-based when basic market research emerged in the 1920s.
An infant form of data-driven marketing had arrived (though the data that became available, while useful, wasn’t exactly extensive due to the labor-intensive effort involved).
Then came more formalized market research and the emergence of George Gallup — of the famous Gallup poll statistical method of measuring public opinion. He and others continues to innovate, developing early iterations of marketing data science.
As the decades wound on, thanks to ongoing advances in market research and analysis, data was getting bigger, better, more accurate. It was being used more frequently by advertising agencies and marketers to make decisions, justify budgets, and provide results insights.
The advent of the Internet in the early nineties, plus rapid advances in computerization and digital technology, changed the game again. The true age of big data and data science had arrived. As of 2024, around 5.3 billion people are active online. And the volume of data available from that activity is expected to continue increasing rapidly.
This means an enormous amount of potential marketing data and consumer insights for marketers to take advantage of, with the help of data science to sort the information and an analytics expert to help determine what’s useful and what's not.
There’s a difference between big data and useful data, and top-quality data science can make big data very ‘useful’ indeed for marketing purposes.
💡Tip: Compare top consumer insights tools.
Defining a Data-driven Strategy
French Internet industry pioneer, AT Internet, states that a data-driven strategy “enables companies to examine and organize their data with the goal of better serving their customers and consumers. By using data to drive its actions, an organization can contextualize and/or personalize its messaging to its prospects and customers for a more customer-centric approach.”
The process, AT Internet adds, can also be termed ‘data analytics’ or even ‘data democratization’ in that “the process of democratizing data means making data accessible to as many people as possible within a company”.
DialogTech, a Chicago-based business specializing in analyzing and optimizing phone data for businesses, gives its definition as: “A marketing strategy that uses data — acquired through consumer interactions and third parties — to gain a better view into consumers’ motivations, preferences, and behaviors. Marketers then create personalized messaging and experiences that deliver the highest possible ROI.”
Frequently asked questions
What is data-driven marketing?
It is the use of data obtained from various sources, which is analyzed and acted upon to give direction to an organization’s marketing efforts. The data informs the plan.
Why is data-driven marketing important?
Because it uses the widest possible range of up-to-date information to drive strategy. It doesn’t rely on assumptions, limited knowledge, or out-of-date research.
What is the meaning of data-driven?
These are decisions or actions that are guided by the gathering and analysis of data.
How do you do data-driven marketing?
The key actions are:
- Define your objectives
- Gather and analyze the data
- Devise a marketing strategy based on data insights
- Implement the plan
- Analyze the results
The Adoption of Data Science Hasn't Been Universal — Here's Why
While the theory and principles behind data-focused campaigns are solid, not all businesses use it. But why?
The most likely possibility is a lack of data scientists. That plus the daunting nature and cost of analyzing and making effective use of massive volumes of marketing data has resulted in a surprising slow adoption rate among businesses.
One survey on the data scientist shortage found that 73% of UK firms said they lacked the talent to complete artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science initiatives.
And Quanthub, a data skills platform tracking the data scientist shortage, found that in 2020 there was a shortage of 250,000 data scientists.
According to Forbes, nearly 36% of companies don’t use all the big data they possess and 47% are only planning to implement a data analysis tool in the future.
The same article quotes the Meaningful Brands 2019 report by Havas Group, which projects that 81% of European brands could go extinct because they don’t create relevant content.
Havas found that only 19% of companies conduct customer behavior analysis, segment their audiences correctly, or personalize their campaign offers. Forbes points out that using data science to produce such insights would enable those organizations to “know what customers want and when they want it” and that the cost of marketing teams ignoring this information might be a “fast exit” from business.
Vlad Flaks, CEO of OWOX BI, an all-in-one marketing analytics platform, observes that companies that don’t care about analytics and data science also risk wasting their advertising budgets. This is because their marketing personnel know too little about click-through rates, conversion rates, and other key metrics driving the customer journey and customer buy-in to campaigns.
Developing a Data-driven Campaign Strategy
So it's safe to say effective adoption of marketing data to drive campaigns is still somewhat patchy — thanks to unconvinced CMOs, slashed marketing budgets, limited human resources, complex data science, and the cost-prohibitiveness of data scientists.
Therefore, organizations that can implement a successful data-focused marketing strategy should have a notable competitive advantage.
Key trends for big data marketing campaigns
If you're wondering how to do data-driven marketing, here are some key trends for marketers to be aware of when developing a data-focused campaign strategy.
The shift to first-party data
Growing popularity and availability of AI and machine learning
Increased desire for personalization in marketing
The continued rise of cross-channel marketing
More emphasis on data security
Breakdown of silos
The shift to first-party data
Third-party data restrictions are growing because of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other consumer data-privacy regulations worldwide.
Consequently first-party data — meaning accurate big data that organizations capture from their own customers and analyzed using data science — will become more important for campaign planning in the future.
Growing popularity and availability of AI and machine learning
AI has surged onto the world stage, affecting how business is done on small and large scales. AI and machine learning have a huge impact when it comes to data science, especially in predictive analytics, presenting data summaries, and helping make sense of larger quantities of data in shorter amounts of time.
Increased desire for personalization in marketing
More and more, consumers are indicating that personalization matters when it comes to making purchase decisions and brand loyalty. A 2017 study found that 80% of respondents were more likely to do business with a company if it offered personalized experiences. 90% indicated that they find personalization appealing.
Before having a viable way to narrowcast their message to a target audience of one, marketers had to rely on the far less effective spray-and-pray’ approach. Now, modern technology and big data are making hyper-personalized messaging viable — whether it be via targeted website interactions, email campaigns, social media touch-points, or serving specific content to different audiences.
The continued rise of cross-channel marketing
The number of touch-points that people use to interact with brands is continually increasing — from in-store visits to websites, social media channels, mobile phones, tablets, and who-knows-what in the future.
This means more opportunities for companies to gather big data and extract key insights, but also means a bigger need to fine-tuned marketing strategies to be channel-specific for the greatest ROI.
New channels continue to pop-up as well, so successful businesses need to keep a keen eye on the social media landscape. For example, consider the meteoric rise of TikTok after it burst on the scene, or the slow but steady growth of Threads.
📚Tip: Learn more about the rise of TikTok, what is Meta Threads, and check out the most important TikTok statistics.
More emphasis on data security
Given the slow demise of third-party data due to legislative and other pressures, getting first-party big data from willing consumers is vital. But they first need to be convinced your business is ethical in its use of personal data, and has the appropriate data-security protocols in place. So clear communication of your policies is vital.
Break down of silos
We're also seeing greater collaboration between those who create and execute campaigns and the data analysts and data scientists behind the scenes.
Most teams now recognize that siloed approaches are counter-productive, while fully informed relationships that maximize understanding of the customer journey are far more beneficial. So too are marketing KPIs that encourage your team to be more data-centric.
Examples of Successful Data-driven Campaigns
Here are some campaign examples that used data science and a data-driven strategy to great effect. Get inspiration by reading how these companies executed precise and engaging marketing campaigns all around data:
IBM Watson
The winner of the UK’s Campaign Tech Award in 2020, for the Best Use of Data and Insight, was IBM Watson, the computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language.
To celebrate its 30-year association with Wimbledon tennis, IBM’s marketers wanted to showcase the capabilities of Watson AI during the 2019 tournament (Campaign Live).
The question for the marketing team was how to reach people while the matches were being played. A challenge considering that most matches were aired on weekdays, and therefore accessing live updates wasn't easy, especially for commuters?
The answer was a campaign that utilized AI to create highlight packages to broadcast digitally, out-of-home.
"Watson edited action from hours of footage using unstructured data (such as crowd noise and player emotions like fist-pumping) and created a highlight clip within two minutes. Every point on all six show courts had to be analyzed simultaneously to show the clips on screens across London." (Campaign Live)
IBM’s analytics showed a steep increase in Top-of-Mind Preference scores: from 8% before Wimbledon to 21% afterward. They also scored a significant increase in Social AI share of voice during the campaign, from 14% to 22%.
‘Politics of your diet’ campaign
Grubhub, the American online food ordering and delivery platform, has a strategy of creating interesting content from the data that it gathers from its customer interactions. It then partners with publishers, which uses these data-generated stories to create native advertising that feels natural.
As explained by Swedish-based analytics and automation company, Triggerbee: To expand its partnerships to publishers focused on politics, GrubHub analyzed how the food choices of their users correlated with their political leanings and then connected those to congressional districts around the US held by either Republicans or Democrats.
The creative concept was to “test the politics of your diet”, which generated some interesting stories about how, for example, Democrats are more likely to order veggie burgers while Republicans favored hamburgers.
“[The] results were pretty interesting and potentially made it easier for the company to [provide] their data to secure new partnerships with political publishers,” Triggerbee commented. “It’s easy to see how this same technique could be applied to other industries, allowing them to expand their native advertising base and grow their revenue.”
How big data informed "The Lion King" campaign
Another example of how marketing data can inform your campaigns is "The Lion King" remake from 2019.
The films executives producing team needed a way to help ensure that the film, a live-action remake of the 1994 classic, would not end up in a downward spiral of public ambivalence and apathy — a fate that befalls many a remake.
Meltwater provided a solution. The insights gained by Meltwater social listening tools enabled the marketing team to fine-tune their strategy.
For example, by analyzing over 5,000 mentions in the news around the world and more than 2-million social mentions from just November 2018, it became clear that promoting the return of actor James Earl Jones as the voice of Mufasa would be importance.
Fans were ecstatic when they heard the booming ubiquitous baritone voice of Jones narrate the trailer. In comparison, global megastar Beyoncé’s involvement in the project had only a relatively small number of social mentions in the same timeframe.
This insight revealed that even the presence of an undoubtedly talented superstar like Beyoncé could not match the level of nostalgia brought by James Earl Jones. And it emphasized a need to harness that sense of nostalgia when promoting the new version.
Read the full case study
If you're interested in how Meltwater media intelligence can be used to inform your own data-driven marketing strategy,
Other examples of effective data-driven marketing campaigns
Some other examples of effective use of marketing data analysis include:
- The Weather Channel in the US analyzes the geographic location of the millions of visitors to its website to sell highly targeted advertising opportunities to advertisers. For example, anti-frizz hair products to site visitors from humid climates, or skin moisturizers to people living in dryer parts of the country.
- Automakers analyze the data that high-tech modern cars send back constantly via the cloud, to tailor personalized new product offers to those customers. For example: accessories, specialist driver training, or even new vehicles better suited to their lifestyle.
- YouTube, Netflix and other video-streaming platforms use constant analysis of past customer preference data to suggest other videos, movies and music that are likely to appeal to that customer.
- GreenPal, a lawn care company, analyzed census data in its home city and created an ad campaign targeted to an up-and-coming suburb where people wanted lawn care but were price sensitive. By emphasizing that GreenPal could offer a cost-effective service at a specified price, the click-through rate increased by 200% and the on-page conversion rose by 30%.
Data-driven Marketing Campaigns: In Summary
To quote Forbes columnist Vlad Flaks again, effective use of data analysis gives you a competitive edge when you plan campaigns:
“Experience and even tested hypotheses aren’t a sufficient basis for decision-making...Your opinion or what you’ve done for years can completely differ from what your customers want today and are ready to pay for. Personalization and smart interaction design are the two main features of market leaders. Your task is to know everything about your customers and forecast their next wishes and purchases.”
In short, if you’re looking to achieve extraordinary strategic business growth, data-driven marketing may be the answer. Gather big data; use machine learning; employ data scientists; embrace data science; utilize analytics. Success could be yours!
And if you want to learn more about using data to guide your marketing strategy, fill out the form below!
