5 Data-Driven Marketing Stats That Impact Your Business

5 Data-Driven Marketing Stats That Impact Your Business

Thanks to global marketing research think-tanks like Forrester, Econsultancy and others, there are some astounding findings on the power of data-driven marketing. These studies have been conducted at great length and cost in order to provide a clearer picture of the global future of marketing. However, there are underlying findings in these statistics that impact your business on a more direct and local level. Today, we’ll analyze what their findings reveal and how you can apply it to your marketing strategies.

#5 – 33% of marketers say having the right technologies for data collection and analysis is the most useful in understanding customers.

Three of the most important benefits of data-driven marketing are improved customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty.  We all crave that, and according to this stat, it’s infinitely easier when you have the right technologies for data collection and analysis. So what are these “right technologies?” Let’s begin with the five basic technologies every marketing stack needs in order to truly deliver customer insights:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System – This martech tool is the home of all your customer contact information. Its primary functions are to organize, categorize, and prioritize contacts, and track interactions with past, current, and prospective customers.
   Examples: Salesforce; Hubspot
2. Marketing Automaton Platform (MAP) – Your marketing automation platform is the tool that governs all of your marketing campaign efforts and workflows. It enables you to design, store and automatically send marketing campaigns according to the rules and schedules you establish.
   Examples: Oracle Eloqua; Marketo

3. Content Management System (CMS) – This software makes campaign personalization easy and scalable by keeping track of content across systems in your stack. The best versions are able to find, pull and place custom content in campaigns for you before automatically sending them.
   Examples: Sureshot Activate

4. Central Data Platform (CDP) – A CDP empowers you to manage the data collected across all systems in your martech from a central dashboard. It performs a host of critical functions, including: tracking data quality; validating and enriching data; mining data for insights and reports, and much more.
   Examples: Sureshot Command

5. Martech Integration Platform – Martech stacks typically host up to 20 different technologies and your martech integration platform ensures that they are not only able to work well together, but share data in ways that enable you to achieve specific business goals.
   Examples: Sureshot Connect

#4 – 30%  of organizations currently have no strategy to update inaccurate or incomplete records.

Hopefully, the 30 percent this statistic refers to are your competitors. However, if this does describe your company, implementing a solution is fairly easy and certainly more economical than the $3 trillion dirty data cost U.S. businesses each year — and that’s just in the U.S. We live in a culture of constant flux. People changes companies, jobs and titles more often than in any other time in history. If the systems that house your data aren’t keeping up with all of this change, you are wasting money on campaigns that have been set up to fail. Nowadays it’s easy to ensure your data is perpetually clean and complete simply by connecting all of the systems that house data via a martech integration platform, and then integrating a CDP into your stack that is capable of managing data quality on a segment level.

#3 – 65% of B2B buyers say they’re likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalize communications to them.

According to a recent article in AdWeek, “B2B customers want more than product features and bundled services – they’re demanding engaging, personalized human experiences. CMOs must develop new capabilities and leverage data to target, craft, and deliver not only messaging, but also orchestrate moments that matter.”  Personalizing campaigns for customers may seem like a daunting task, but again, the right martech can make this process infinitely easier. Martech tools, such as a CMS, go a long way in enabling you to address each customer’s personal interests by pulling content according to their interests and sending it automatically. This offers a two-fold benefit in that it provides customers with immediate gratification and builds their confidence in your company’s ability to listen to them and respond with something relevant to their needs. Good B2B personalization is not just about addressing customers by name and sending them things they are interested in, it’s also about respecting their preferences. If they prefer SMS notices about bills and emails about product updates, make sure the communications you send them adhere to those preferences.

#2 – Forrester reports that data-driven companies grow more than 30% annually on average.

This stat is a good starting point for rating whether or not your data-driven marketing efforts are on target. If your company did grow around 30 percent last year, which campaigns contributed the most to this outcome? How can you replicate and multiply those successes next year? If it grew more that 30 percent, congratulations on not only being above average, but joining the ranks of elite marketers. What strategies do you plan to use to up your game next year? If your company didn’t grow as much as you expected, what are some things that you plan to do differently? For example, did your campaigns deliver the ROI you hoped for? If not, have you tested different approaches? Were you able to personalize campaigns across all channels? Is there a specific area in the customer journey, where you are seeing drop-off? Are you using a multi-channel approach or still relying heavily on email?

Once you have a list of issues you want to address and strategies you want to try, if possible, take a one-at-a-time approach so you can better gauge the impact of each on campaign performance. Above all, use your MAP and CDP to track trends and campaign performance over time so that your team can see how their collective efforts are impacting the company in the long-run.

#1 – According to a study by NewVantage Partners, only 31% of executives feel they have been able to build a “data-driven culture.”

Building a data-driven culture not only takes the right team and tools, it takes time. If you haven’t arrived yet, don’t despair. You are in good company. As you continue to execute strategies, add martech tools, develop campaigns and pursue other marketing efforts, be sure to celebrate your milestones and victories. Share data reports with both your team and executives. Lastly, give everyone on your marketing operations team freedom to learn from mistakes, course correct and try new things.  As you do all these things, soon enough you will find yourself joining the 31 percent who have built a successful data-driven culture.