What Is Data-Driven Marketing And How Does It Apply In Singapore?

Consumers are increasingly becoming mindful of the products they buy and the ads they want to see. If you wish to remain relevant and competitive, you need more insights into consumer preferences. The best way to get this information is through data collection. According to Forbes, over 40% of businesses are willing to allocate more money towards data-driven marketing.

What is Data-Driven Marketing?

What Is Data-Driven Marketing And How Does It Apply In Singapore?

Data-driven marketing refers to a strategy where you use information sourced from your customers optimise and target your product promotion campaigns. It is one of the popular trends among companies that do digital marketing in Singapore.

Marketers are now collecting data at every touchpoint to understand their audiences better. The data is then processed and used to predict future behaviours and make real-time marketing decisions. Some of the information that companies source from their customers includes, browsing patterns, online purchase behaviour, social media activity, and many other metrics.

The Best Data-Driven Marketing Strategies

If you are doing data-driven marketing in Singapore, here are the must-have strategies.

• Use Demographic Data When Planning

When you are planning to launch a new marketing campaign, you should have some information about your target audience. Most marketers mistakenly believe that knowing consumer behaviour and tracking their social media activity is enough.

The information mentioned above is an excellent starting point. However, you need more data if you want to get more success from your marketing efforts. For instance, if you are planning to introduce a new product, you will need to know if your audience can afford it by studying their income levels.

Using demographic data such as income levels allows you to make your ads more contextual and relevant to the consumer. As a result, you can significantly boost conversions and increase sales.

• Use Trends from Other Marketing Channels as a Guide

One of the biggest challenges in marketing is introducing a new strategy when what you already have is working. It seems risky to venture into new tactics when the existing ones are generating leads, getting conversions and improving sales.

The reality is that the data that is useful for other strategies can also work in data-driven marketing.  For instance, you can use the findings from your SEO keyword research to improve other areas of your digital marketing strategies in Singapore, such as SEM and SMM.

• Measure Success in Milestones

The current buying cycle is complicated, as the customer has to pass through many stages before they purchase an item.  Your marketing campaign is only one of these stages. 

When you market your product, you are making your potential customers aware of its existence. You need to go a step further and convince them that it will solve a challenge they are experiencing or add some value to their life.

As you optimise your marketing in Singapore, remember to monitor every step that the customer takes as they go down the sales funnel. This allows you to see the stage at which most customers are abandoning the buying cycle. With this information, you can optimise your campaigns further and become more successful. Even better, you cut down on wasteful expenses.

• Assess the Impact of Industry Developments to Your Campaigns

As a marketer, you should always respond immediately to any industry developments. Data-driven marketing, like other niches of digital marketing, is continually changing. Some of the most recent developments include the use of AI in digital marketing.

If you get left behind, you will lose ground to your competitors and hurt your revenue.

In the case of data-driven marketing, you can keep up with changes by dividing your campaigns into specific time frames, say 60 days. Once this period elapses, you should examine the data and take note of any changes. For instance, you can look at the level of competition, number of engagements, and so forth.

If you notice any anomaly, you should come up with ways to correct it. The same applies to any external factors such as algorithm changes. You should modify your campaign so that it conforms to the latest best practices.

The Benefits of Data-driven Marketing

Not only is data-driven marketing beneficial to an organisation, but consumers too can gain a lot as well. When the ensuing strategies are used appropriately, the following benefits are possible:

• Clear-cut clarity to understand and determine the most accurate and actionable information about existing and potential customers
• Personalised marketing to the right audience at the right time
• Marketers can leverage the information to extend the reach of their marketing campaigns across multiple channels
• Refine customer experiences
• Improve product development by reducing product failure rates

With that said, data-driven marketing faces a variety of challenges. The main struggles that marketers face include:

• Automating and integrating the data into marketing strategies
• Collaboration between teams and different departments
• Monitoring the changes in the industry such as what the competition is doing
• Continued measurements of the market strategies to see how data-driven marketing is working

Here is why many marketers are relying on data devise tactics for their marketing campaigns.

• It Makes Personalisation Easier and More Effective

Consumer data allows you to segment your audience and create personalised campaigns that target specific groups. According to studies, personalisation increases the success of a marketing campaign significantly. The reason for this is that people are more likely to buy an item that is tailored to their needs.  

• Decisions are Backed by Concrete Data

When you start relying on data, you make better and more informed marketing decisions. Data collection show you who is likely to buy your products, the kind of content they like, and where to make improvements for your marketing in Singapore.

• Clearer Customer Journeys

As mentioned earlier, the current sales funnel is way different from the way it was in the past. The availability of several digital channels means that customers do not follow a distinct path before they purchase your products.

A customer might find your business on Google, read reviews on a third-party site, get recommendations from social media and compare prices before deciding on whether to buy an item. With data-driven marketing, you can understand all the stages in the buying cycle and create content for each step of the process.

• A Better Understanding of ROI

Data-driven marketing provides stats that measure the success of your marketing campaigns. You can easily track the performance of your email marketing, conversion rate optimisation and other digital marketing strategies in Singapore.

By knowing what is successful, you can eliminate unproductive campaigns. In return, you maximise your ROI.

• Challenges of Data-driven Marketing

Similar to other marketing strategies, data-driven marketing has several downsides. 

The first challenge is finding the right team for the job. It can be quite challenging to find the personnel who have the skills and expertise required to collect, process and analyse consumer data. The quickest solution to this is by enrolling in data science lessons.

Another challenge is conflicting data. The success of data-driven marketing depends on high-quality and integrated data, which is hard to obtain. If you have conflicting data, you will not be able to make informed decisions. 

A lack of integration means that your data-driven marketing will struggle to collect the information needed for a unified customer view. For instance, e-commerce websites may find it challenging to obtain and structure data from handheld devices and social media. 

Lastly, you need to be committed for it to be successful. Do not invest in data-driven strategies if you are not prepared to commit. Even if you have the right tactics, you will not succeed if you do not put enough effort.

• Implement a Data Strategy

It is impossible to jump into data-driven marketing without having the data. For this reason, Singapore marketers start by creating and implementing a data management strategy to leverage the available data.

A data strategy needs to start with a change in the organisational culture. This means a shift from a culture of having a lot of data to one which manages data appropriately. More so, the change must regard data analytics very highly.

This change needs to begin with the top management of the business to ensure that new initiatives have the necessary business support. After this, marketers need to push for a data-awareness culture at the ground level. This is because, if there are no analysts, then the insights will not be available.

For this reason, organisations need to upgrade their infrastructure and systems. This needs to be done after the cultural change; otherwise, there is a risk of investing in expensive systems that no one knows how to use or motivated to implement.

This way, the Singapore marketers are in a better position to collect data, analyse it and improve the marketing performance with data-driven insights.

• Looking For Data Use Opportunities

Singapore marketers are always on the lookout for ways and opportunities that the data will improve their marketing processes. For example, retargeting is one of the ways that businesses could use web data to improve their performance. Using well-organised data will ensure that there are much better results.

One of the ways that marketers can identify opportunities for using the data is by using a phenomenon known as attribution modelling. The model can be adjusted every so often to include new data.

Moreover, data-driven marketing is one of the best ways that they can learn about their customers, both existing and potential. This includes website behaviour; ad clicks, and purchase history, which shows the marketers what the consumers care about right from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

Debunking the 9 Biggest Data-Driven Marketing Myths

 

Transitioning from traditional digital marketing strategies to data-driven marketing will enable you to get maximum ROI from your marketing campaigns. Every process and content developed will be based on market insights and trends on how customers interact and engage with your brand.

Like any other digital marketing strategy, data-driven marketing is not devoid of myths. Here are the top myths about this form of marketing and the truth.

Myth 1# Data-Driven Marketing is Too Technical and Relies Heavily on Technology

One of the main reasons why most people are hesitant to embrace data-driven marketing techniques is because of the perception that it’s too technical and heavily relies on technology.

Even though the processes rely on reports generated by various market analytics tools, it does not revolve around technology alone. Marketers take time to understand the target customers’ needs based on the data available about them. 

Through the analysis, they can know which is the best way of engaging with the customers. The human-centric aspect of the marketing campaign complements the data aspect to help brands get maximum ROI from their campaigns. 

Myth 2# Only Big Companies with Huge Market Base and Revenue Can Leverage Data-Driven Marketing

This is arguably one of the most common myths we hear in discussions about data-driven marketing. The small and medium business owners believe that only big companies with a huge market base and revenue can leverage data-driven marketing. 

The misconception is that you need a huge pool of information about the target customers to do this form of advanced level marketing.  

False – the truth is that even small-scale and medium businesses can take advantage of the many opportunities that data-driven marketing offers to increase their sales. Most analytics tools are free, and no prior experience or skills are required to generate and interpret the reports. 

However, it’s imperative to have a team of digital marketing professionals on your side that you can reach out to for clarifications before launching a campaign. 

Myth 3# Data Never Goes Stale

We operate in a fast-paced digital business environment that is dynamic and, to some degree, unpredictable. Marketing strategies that used to work well a few months ago are obsolete today. Some brands switch to data-driven marketing because the data available about the target customers never go stale or has no limited validity.

As a result, they end up spending thousands of dollars on campaigns only to get little or no results. The plausible reason why the campaign fails is that they use inaccurate data to make decisions. 

Even outside the data-driven marketing realm, any data you have about the market has a limited lifespan. Ideally, you should limit yourself to using data that is three months old to make decisions. 

Therefore, it’s important to regularly do market research and benchmark it against your competitors to determine its accuracy. Go a step further and monitor the results achieved after implementing the campaigns to confirm that the data in your hands is accurate and capable of scaling up your business.

Myth 4# It’s All About Data

One of the myths that mislead most businesses is that they can rely primarily on the datasets available to create and run data-driven campaigns. 

The truth is that marketing campaigns cannot succeed in generating sales and increasing brand awareness online by relying on the database. As mentioned earlier, you should confirm the authenticity of the data before using it to make marketing decisions. 

Other aspects that directly impact the marketing campaign should also be considered to enhance its relevance and ability to bring in more organic traffic and sales.

Myth 5# Big Data is Unstructured

Firstly, data-driven marketing campaigns rely on the accuracy of big data. However, it’s wrong to perceive that big data is just a huge collection of information that is not structured. 

Before implementing a data-driven marketing campaign, it’s imperative to ensure that the data is grouped in categories such as the industry and job profile of the ideal customers. The categorisation will help you develop custom marketing campaigns for each segment. Also, the segments will help you do analysis accurately.

Myth 6# Huge Capital Investment is Required to Run a Data-Driven Marketing Campaign

Digital marketing is expensive, but that should not discourage you from applying a particular campaign. Contrary to popular belief, a data-driven marketing campaign does not require a large amount of money. 

Nowadays, the industry has involved, and most of the resources you need to run a data-driven campaign are open source. This means that you won’t pay a penny to use the analytics tools during the initial stages. 

However, as the business scales up and once you are sure that the campaigns are working in your favour, consider upgrading to the premium tools to get detailed insights about your customer base. 

Compared to conventional digital marketing campaigns, data-driven marketing is cost-effective since it is based on accurate market insights. Unlike before, all the decisions you make will be based on data and not assumptions. 

Myth 7# The Marketing Campaigns Cannot be Customised/Personalised

You probably already know the importance of personalising the campaigns to match the different customers. 

The same applies to data-driven marketing campaigns. You cannot rely on the same datasets used by the competitors to create your campaigns. The data vendor should furnish you with data grouped and analysed based on your brand’s specific CRM requirements. 

In a nutshell, data-driven marketing should help you manage customised customer data on one dashboard. 

Myth 8# Data-Based Marketing Does Offer Detailed Insights About the Customers

Due to the many technicalities involved in creating data-driven marketing campaigns, there is a common belief that the marketing plans don’t provide detailed customer insights. 

The truth is that this new generation way of doing digital marketing offers better insights about the customers than the conventional processes. For instance, it details how the customers engage with your brand. 

Having detailed information about the existing customers and the potential ones you aim to connect with will create sustainable market plans. It will also save you time that would have been spent repeatedly tweaking the digital marketing campaigns. 

Myth 9# The Databases Are Unauthentic and Unverified

Databases are regularly updated to ensure they are accurate and capable of helping your business grow. Sure, there may be some unverified databases, but most reputable data vendors have put in place measures that ensure that their database is accurate.

Data-Driven Marketing Trends in 2022 That You Should Follow

Data-driven marketing is here to stay, and it will only get better with time. A recent report shows that 64% of marketing executives from leading brands strongly agree that data-driven marketing is crucial to dominating the current market.

Here are the top 5 data-driven marketing trends you should keep in mind and follow. 

• Digital Marketers Will Start Relying More on First-Party Data

For a long time, digital marketers have been relying on second-party and third-party data to create campaigns. With the stringent implementation of regulations and policies such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and GDPR, their ability to net and use third-party data is limited. 

Major search engines such as Chrome, Bing, Safari, and Firefox have already announced plans to introduce new privacy restrictions to protect their users and conform with the regulations.

As a result, data-driven marketing campaigns will be more based on first-party data. You might ask, what is first-party data? This is data that is the audience willingly provides to brands. 

A study conducted in the United States revealed that 43% of people who shop online would not allow companies to collect their personal data for purposes of providing personalised products and customised shopping experiences. Only 63% of those polled were open to sharing their data with brands, and even so, they would only do it if the service or product offered was truly valuable. 

Develop smart ways of tapping this data without violating the regulations to continue generating sales from the ever-growing digital business landscape.

• Buying Journeys Will Have More Touchpoints

Compared to the traditional consumer journey, the current consumer journey has anywhere between 20 and 50 different touchpoints. As the complexity of the purchase increases, the number of touchpoints also increases.

Also, online customers have higher expectations than ever before. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that your data-driven marketing approach unifies or connects the different channels to create a cohesive and desirable brand experience for customers. 

Work on properly attributing all your marketing channels and touchpoints to encourage the customers to buy products or use your services instead of the competitors. The marketing program needs to be intelligently isolated to move the needle and realise a positive change in sales and revenue. 

• Customers Expect Personalised Shopping Experiences

First, to succeed in digital marketing, you need to devise ways of capturing first-party data from the different touchpoints in the buyer’s journey. In return, the customers expect you to offer personalised shopping experiences.

Many studies have shown that 80% of online customers are more likely to purchase a service or product from a company that offers personalised experiences. That means you need to reimagine your campaigns and segment the audience further to create laser-focused copy and marketing strategies for each of them.

• Brand Loyalty is Slowing Fading Out

In the past, you have probably focussed your marketing campaigns on generating sales and nurturing brand loyalty. 

In 2022, you need to make drastic changes to your data-driven marketing approaches to offer a smooth experience to every customer. The experience must be replicated on every channel; if not, the customers will not hesitate to exit.

Remember that 32% of customers polled in a recent survey said they decided to stop doing business with a brand they previously loved after one bad experience. Understand that it only takes one mistake to lose a loyal customer and ruin the reputation you have worked hard for years to build. 

In a nutshell, 17% of customers are likely to walk away after one bad experience, and only 59% will be patient and ditch the brand after several bad experiences. 

Phone call experience has the highest potential of either enhancing or breaking customers’ brand loyalty. Even with the increased use of chatbots to offer customer support, you need to put protocols to connect customers who call into an expert who can resolve the issues they face amicably. 

59% of customers hang up if nobody responds to their call within 10 minutes. As you create a plan to leverage data-driven marketing in 2022, you cannot afford to keep the customers waiting in line for the next available customer care representative. 

• Use of Marketing Automation and AI-Powered Tools Will Increase 

Personalisation should be an integral part of your data-driven marketing campaigns in 2022 and beyond. This year, the use of marketing automation and AI-powered tools will increase significantly as marketers rush to offer personalised shopping experiences.

The tools will also be instrumental in helping companies create personalised content for each audience segment. Leading brands and marketers are already using artificial intelligence for various marketing processes such as optimising ad bidding, getting insights from conversations done on the phone, and personalising website browsing experiences. 

Research the different AI-powered and marketing automation tools available in the market to find ones that you can incorporate in your business to get ahead of the competition. If you ignore this recommendation, you will be left behind and have trouble connecting with potential customers. 

Those are the five main data-driven marketing trends that will redefine how brands market themselves in 2022. With 82% of tech-savvy digital marketers planning to increase their use of first-party data to create marketing campaigns, it’s imperative to know the type of data you should collect to get a clearer perspective of your customers. Find tools that can capture the following data:

• Web analytics data
• Customer relationship management (CRM) data
• Mobile application usage data
• Transaction data
• Call tracking data
• Conversation intelligence data

Having all these data clusters is great, but they will only position your business for success if you analyse and correctly apply them in your data-driven marketing campaigns. Get in touch with MediaOne Marketing today for professional guidance on how to acquire the data and use it in marketing campaigns. We look forward to seeing you win. 

Conclusion

In this age, you have to embrace data-driven marketing strategies to stand a chance against competing businesses. 

With the introduction of new technologies such as AI, big data analytics and machine learning, the future looks bright from data-driven marketing. These will make it easier to collect data from customers. In exchange, consumers will expect to get more personalised experiences from businesses.

Call us today at +65 6789 9852 for more tips on how to do digital marketing in Singapore.