The vast majority of marketers understand the positive impact data-driven marketing can have on customer relationships and ROI, they lack the capabilities, knowledge, and confidence needed to utilise the abundance of data available to them. With the rapid pace of change in the technological landscape, it is more essential than ever for marketers to ensure their marketing is data-driven, customer-centric, personalised and measurable.
From precise targeting and accurately attributing value across all channels to providing insight into the creative aspects of the job, data science has the potential to transform businesses. The UK Government’s digital strategy highlights data as a key catalyst for the development of the UK economy, and businesses need to be prepared to take advantage of the technology and data driving this growth.
As data continues to proliferate, the challenges in managing it do too. Technologies will eventually catch up in terms of data processing, insight, and automation, particularly as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent. However, even with emerging technologies, marketers will still need to be able to plug them into legacy systems and use analytically derived insight to stay ahead of the game. By adopting best-practice data-driven marketing today and looking for help from experts, brands can effectively plug the data skills gap.
We recently worked with leading British designer, Ted Baker, to optimise their marketing strategies through advanced customer segmentation. Segmentation allows a business to identify their customers and their spending habits in order to enhance this and address any business retention concerns in advance. Our solution was to use a predictive algorithm to classify new customers as one-time only customers or repeat customers, demonstrated that revenue generated by a targeted marketing campaign could be increased over that of a blind marketing strategy. The investment in data science that was made by Ted Baker allowed them to maximise the ROI, enhance the effectiveness of their ad campaigns and reach new customers. There are many other ways data science can make your marketing function more effective:
10 Ways Data Science Will Accelerate Your Marketing
1. Optimising Budgets
Fiscal planning is time consuming but imperative in order to accelerate the effectiveness of your marketing budget. Communicate your budget to your data scientist and they will be able to build a model that manages how you distribute funds across campaigns, platforms and locations to optimise your reach, effectiveness and return on investment.
2. Highly Focused Application
Rather than falling into the common mistake of overly broad marketing campaigns, highly focused data science can help you to produce relevant and well-utilised marketing techniques. Through properly focused application, the data that you hold becomes all the more valuable which translates into better targeted campaigns.
3. Match Strategies To Customers
Data science allows you to maximise the potential of your marketing campaign reaching the right customers at the right time; and provide the ability to segment customers by their behaviour as well as their demographics, so you can target them more effectively with messages and offers. This is exceptionally valuable as part of a customer retention strategy, as marketing can be tailored to relevant customers to stop them leaving. Likewise, referral incentives can be targeted to high value customers and multi-buy vouchers can be sent to frequent shoppers to encourage further spend.
4. Channel Optimisation
For companies with multiple marketing channels such as social media, local press, television and email; optimisation is key in order to get the best returns. Data science can enhance your channel optimisation by detailing how effective previous campaigns have been, which customers will be best targeted through which avenues, return on investments, key marketing times and customer behaviour in each channel. Again, by offering a broad multichannel marketing plan, you will only ever have limited success. However, a focused strategy that embraces several platforms and optimises the knowledge that you have about their effectiveness will allow you to develop a stronger and more profitable future campaigns.
5. Planning
Planning marketing campaigns should always revolve around the customer experience and this can be enhanced using data science. The data you hold contains valuable information about what, when and how your customers engage with you and is crucial to producing the most effective marketing strategies. Plan your marketing to address your business needs, overall economic conditions, customer behaviours and any strategic threats. For example, there also may be times, specific to your business, that can be prime opportunities for a marketing push. Using your transaction and page view data, a data scientist can use a time series analysis to examine these cycles in depth and give you further insight into the optimal times to launch your marketing campaigns.
6. Highly Targeted Marketing Campaigns
Data science can improve the ability to target customers and deliver effective campaigns at the most effective times. Whether you want to run a promotion during a public holiday, identify your most valuable customers or launch a new product, data science allows you to dictate the information that needs to be shared with an intricately targeted audience and this means profitability and awareness for your firm.
7. Use Real-Time Data
Data science allows marketing campaigns to run from a foundation of real-time data, rather than historical behaviours or unfocused market patterns. This opens up a whole new marketing stream: micro-moments. Using real-time data means that as a marketing manager, you can access information about the whole of market trends, succinct customer base responses, timing effectiveness and key buying patterns. Through utilising this current information, data scientists can identify opportunities before they occur, tackle competitor strengths through carefully planned campaigns and identify new marketing opportunities
8. Partner With Brands To Make Better Use of Big Data
Marketing campaigns that work closely with big brands are afforded the benefit of bigger data. Make use of cross-business data access and data science projects to embrace the opportunity to reach new customers. Teaming with complementary brands should allow you to access big data through a reduced cost which allows you to maximise your returns but minimise your marketing budget.
9. Improve Customer Experience
Ultimately, happy customer experiences lead to repeat business. Data science can help your marketing teams to cement the most positive experiences for your customers by understanding your customer’s buying habits, preferences and behaviours. This will allow you to target them more effectively and provide a more tailored experience. Whether this translates to you forwarding the most appropriate deals, incentives or information or whether it helps you understand the best times to communicate and through which methods, targeting your customers in a way that best suits them is key to you being the preferred brand.
10. Increase Customer Loyalty
Data science can help you improve customer retention by identifying the customers who are likely to consider moving their interests and spends elsewhere. This provides you the opportunity to address their needs before they leave. This strategy can be amplified when combined with targeted marketing (tip #6): when the customer feels valued thanks to your focused offers, ‘personalised’ strategies and well-planned platforms, they are more likely to stay with you. Providing the customer with the most bespoke and positive experience deters them from seeking that from your competitors.
Data Science x Marketing
Data science has the capability of revolutionising your marketing strategies and enhancing your customer’s experience. By optimising the data you hold, your marketing budget can be reduced, your return on investment will increase and your marketing campaigns will attract more valuable and loyal customers.
