Marketing today is all about data. With consumer insights and behavioral data, marketers can more easily reach target audiences with “near-precise” predictability of specific shopping and buying behaviors. However, 87% of marketing professionals say that data is their most under-utilized asset, according to Invesp, and although data-driven marketing strategies drive as much as eight times the ROI when compared with typical marketing strategies, just 40% plan to increase their budgets for data-driven marketing.

Below, we’re discussing everything you need to know to tap into data to unleash effective marketing strategies with high yields, along with tips to update your current approach to data and consumer marketing.

Data-Driven Marketing: Defined

Data-driven marketing uses information about consumers, including preferences, shopping and purchasing habits, and potential motivations, to personalize marketing efforts. Using data, marketers can build personalized brand experiences to showcase products and services to clients who are the most likely to buy or engage with the brand. Data has typically been collected from third-party cookies or through direct consumer interactions (first-party data), but with the phase-out of third-party cookies, marketers will need to consider alternative first-party strategies.

2022 Trends in Data-Driven Marketing

Here are some of the top trends to consider when creating your data-driven marketing strategy.

Utilizing More First-Party Data

Third-party data can be difficult to use effectively thanks to federal regulations, such as the GDPR Cookie Consent and Customer-Centric Privacy law, as well as regulations and privacy restrictions brought forth by search engines such as Chrome, Bing and Safari.

To combat this hurdle, more marketers are starting to use first-party data that’s been captured from their own website visitors, in-store visitors and customers to create more consumer-focused and personalized marketing campaigns.

Consumer Touchpoints Have Increased

According to data published by Venture Harbor, the average consumer journey now involves anywhere from 20 to 500 touchpoints, depending on the value and complexity of the purchase they’re making. That means for every purchase, consumers will typically interact with a brand at least 20 times before completing the buying process. These touchpoints can include interactions with social media, website, advertising, retail store, email, blog or phone calls.

Because the number of touchpoints has become so high, it’s important for marketers to ensure that the brand experience is cohesive regardless of how customers make contact. Of course, the benefit of these touchpoints is that marketers also have more opportunities to gather first-party data and create personalized, targeted marketing campaigns for potential customers that already know their brand.

Businesses can begin mapping out the touchpoints by journey mapping the entire customer experience.

Personalization is Key

As consumers share more of their personal data online, it’s important that marketers realize they want something in return. It’s vital for marketers to provide consumers with personalized recommendations and heightened brand experiences, especially since 80% of consumers surveyed in a Smarter HQ poll stated that they’re more likely to purchase products from brands that market to them, personally.

Begin gathering data from analytics platforms, data management platforms (DMPs), customer relationship management software (CRMs), tag management platforms, demand-side platforms, and email platforms.

Once you have the data, begin delivering personalized content through 1:1 ads, targeted landing pages, emails, blogs, suggested products, add-ons, upgraded versions, etc.

Brand Loyalty is Taking a Backseat

There once was a time when brands relied on the loyalty of their customers to keep them in business but, today, the concept of brand loyalty is taking a backseat to the customer experience. Today’s consumers have higher expectations and, in fact, a recent study indicated that 32% of those surveyed would stop purchasing from a brand after just one negative experience and this is particularly true in parts of the world like Asia, where millennial populations are highest. We’re living in a very brand-saturated market with shorter attention spans, so you have to be everywhere…at the right moment…delivering the right message…to the right prospect…quickly and easily. This is where you can leverage data to personalize the customer journeys.

Automated Marketing is Vital

Automated marketing means scale. You can create 50 different funnels for your target personas and deliver unique experiences for each prospect…this saves marketers time & money. Using AI to automate processes such as data collection, email distribution, workflows, customer service, etc., is the only way to scale effectively and efficiently. Some examples of automated marketing are dynamic web content that changes based on visitors’ interests/attributes, lead nurturing via triggered emails, social media posting, product recommendations, SMS/MMS, push notifications, and so on. Automation makes it easier to manage every marketing task, from basic email sends to complex campaign management and data analysis.