Why should Caribbean organizations put more emphasis on data-driven marketing?

What is it and what are the principles behind it?

What platforms and tools can and should you use?

Data-driven marketing can increase your company’s ROI and can help you to make better strategic decisions.

More often than not, a lot of Caribbean organizations still use marketing channels and tactics that rely rather on gut feeling and a “this is how we have always done it” attitude than reliable customer data to drive marketing decisions and strategy.

So what is data-driven marketing?

With the advent of digital marketing, it became easier than ever to collect data about customer behavior online.

Data-driven marketing is the strategy of using collected customer information to gain better insights into their behavior in order to make better marketing decisions, for example, optimized media buying and creating targeted creatives.

Today’s marketing landscape comprises of three main areas:

1: Creative: the message as a picture, video, audio, or written word.

2: Media: where the message appears. E.g. Facebook, YouTube or Email.

3: Data: who will see the message at what point in time and what do we know about the people.

Customer information like age, gender, online behavior, preferences, CRM data, and even GPS data is now available for everyone that is willing to pay for it.

With data-driven digital marketing, you must combine all three elements, creative, media, and data, to get the best results.

Principles:

Data-Driven Decision Making

It is easy to get overwhelmed with all the available options and all the data once you start.

Therefore make sure that you follow a few simple steps to drive your decisions.

1: Collecting Data

The first step is to make sure that you collect all the data that you need. Make sure that you comply with data protection laws in your jurisdiction.

2: Compiling and Analyzing your Data

Make sure that you sort and analyze your data accordingly. A lot of time and marketing dollars get wasted by dirty or wrong data.

3: Strategy

Based on your data and findings you should be able to state a hypothesis and develop a strategy to test and execute it.

E.g: “It looks like males between 35-55 are our best converting target audience. Let’s run a campaign tailored exclusively to this demographic and measure the results. Does the ROAS of this campaign exceeds the benchmark?”

4: Measuring

Make sure to measure your campaigns accordingly. Was your hypothesis correct? Did the results match the estimates? What did you learn? How can you improve?

You want to make sure to build a constant feedback loop. Test, Analyze, Improve, Repeat.

A word of warning:

Make sure that you base your decisions on large enough data sets. Too often marketers make decisions after they just get a few clicks because they get excited.

You want to make sure that you always reach statistical relevance with your campaigns. Meaning as a rule of thumb you should aim for at least a thousand events before you make a decision.

E.g. if you are testing a landing page or offer, make sure that you are getting at least 1000 website visitors or conversions before you draw your conclusions. Everything else is just statistical noise and you are running the risk of misinterpreting the data.

Tools & Platforms:

There are basically two ways how you can collect and use customer data.

Option 1:

You can use third-party data from existing platforms. For example social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

You can target people on these platforms that interacted with your content or are following your account.

The big advantage is that you don’t have to set up a lot of tech but can often use your existing social media accounts.

The downside is that you technically don’t own this data. You are on rented land here. If the platform decides to limit your access and use of the data, there is not much you can do about it.

Option 2:

You can start collecting your own data. That means for example your own website, mobile app, or CRM system.

Although that usually needs some more technical setup, it is definitely worth the investment.

Not only can you start collecting your own customer data, but you can also match it with platforms like Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn and retarget your customers there.

Fortunately, you only need a few tools to make sure you get the most out of your data. If you install the following handful of tools on your website, you are probably golden.

1: Google Tag Manager.

Google Tag Manager is a tool that not only collects data from your website but also helps you to manage your different marketing tools in one place.

It works the same way as a USB hub or power strip. You install it one time on your website and now can easily add or remove additional tools.

2: Google Analytics

Google Analytics is probably the most used tool when it comes to measuring and analyzing your website and mobile app traffic.

3: Facebook Pixel

The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you can install on your website or mobile app to build custom audiences, measure conversions, and retarget your website visitors on Facebook and Instagram.

4: LinkedIn Insights Tag

The LinkedIn Insights Tag serves a similar purpose like the Facebook Pixel, collecting and matching customer data, in this case, to retarget your visitors on LinkedIn or to measure your conversions from your LinkedIn campaigns.

5: HotJar

HotJar is a software that allows you to create an in-depth analysis of your website visitors via heatmaps and website recordings to better understand your user behavior.

A lot of the most common website or eCommerce solutions offer native integrations for the above-mentioned tools.

Of course, you should also start collecting your customer’s contact information like email addresses or phone numbers.

But there are so many different CRM’s available for all kinds of businesses, that it is almost impossible to recommend one without knowing your business circumstances.

But don’t be afraid to just pick one. It isn’t too hard to just move to another solution later on and take your customer information with you.

Conclusion:

Data-Driven Marketing should be standard for every business by now. There are only a few tools that you need to start.

If you already have an existing website, just make sure to install the above-mentioned tools and you are already ahead of the game.

Simon Küpper

31.08.2021