Data science has penetrated every major industry today, from healthcare and education to business and finance. Data is the hottest buzzword and it holds the potential to optimize business processes and marketing strategies while simultaneously enhancing business decisions. Data science focuses on accumulating data from multiple sources and exploring it to discover and understand underlying patterns and insights that could add value to businesses.
Since businesses are increasingly relying on data to promote data-driven decisions, they are also incorporating data science to streamline their digital marketing strategies. This increasing reliance on data is giving rise to new and exciting career opportunities in data science and big data. And thanks to the Internet, aspiring individuals can now master data science in a few months by enrolling in reputed Data Science courses.
Unlike “hunches” of the Mad Men, today marketers leverage data and statistical tools to create such data-driven results that can add tremendous value to businesses. At their disposal is a vast pool of data, both on their competitors as well as their customers. Leveraging this data helps unravel extremely insightful details required for performing well in the market. This is primarily why data science has become an integral part of digital marketing.
Let’s now see how data science can optimize digital marketing efforts of businesses.
Identifying Buyer Personas
A great entrepreneur or marketer is the one who understands the pain points of his/her customers and knows them inside-out. You cannot expect that your entire consumer base will have the exact same needs and demands. Every individual customer has their distinct requirements and preference patterns based on factors such as their age, gender, location, profession, and so on. So, how will you segregate your customers into separate buyer profiles?
The answer is simple. By tapping into data from multiple sources such as social media platforms and websites. Data science can effectively map events and interactions across social media platforms and create buyer personas. The tweets, social media mentions, comments, posts, and share patterns of your consumers speak volumes about their needs, choices, spending and buying habits, and much more. As you begin to monitor these vital stats, you can better understand how your customers are interacting with your brand and which particular product/service is popular among which customers.
When marketers put an extra effort to create “personalized” consumer experience, not only does the rate of customer satisfaction increase but the chances of customer retention also rise considerably. Furthermore, data science allows marketers to see when their customers are likely to leave through ‘Churn Prediction.’ Churn prediction involves building statistical models to predict the possibility of customers to leave or ‘churn.’ As you know when and why your customers can leave you, you can rethink your operations and marketing strategy to retain them.
Better Insights Through Visualization
As the volume of data continues to increase exponentially, it becomes even more challenging to make sense of this ever-increasing data. Social media is the primary contributor to this surge in data. A user’s social media timeline is essentially the story of his/her life shedding light on things such as their likes and dislikes, their opinions, their interests, etc.
By visualizing these tiny details sprawling on social media platforms, marketers can better understand the social dynamics that are creating a buzz at present. They can get meaningful insights into the latest market and consumer trends, thereby improving their social media marketing strategy. Data science tools can help you to chalk out visualizations like pie charts to depict proportions, line graphs to depict the latest trends, scatter plots to draw correlations, and so on.
Consolidate Marketing Channels For Enhanced Marketing Campaigns
Previously, the various marketing channels such as TV ads, print ads, newsletters, etc., were all measured and tracked in isolation. However, since Big Data came into the limelight, it has become possible for marketers to consolidate multiple data sources to design a 360-degree sketch of all the marketing strategies for various marketing channels. Furthermore, data-driven analysis and marketing initiatives are promoting cross-channel interaction between the different marketing channels. For instance, a TV ad triggers a web search which eventually boosts the click-through rates and also the prospect of customers purchasing products/services.
Big Data insights and predictive analysis are now allowing companies to fetch up to 10-30% higher efficacy of marketing campaigns while maintaining their existing marketing budget. This is possible as with data-driven insights companies can allocate their resources in those avenues and channels that help optimize the operations process and overall efficiency of the marketing campaigns. Ford is an excellent case in point. Using predictive analytics, the car manufacturing giant was able to find that a huge portion of the marketing budget was being spent on the digital display that causes investment in search-related marketing initiatives to fall sharply. On discovering this, Ford was able to restructure its marketing budget to optimize its marketing channels.
Such meaningful insights allow marketers to know how they should distribute their funds; when and how they should reach out to their target audience, and what kind of marketing campaigns should they design to attract potential customers.
Today, marketing is all about creating advertisements and campaigns to influence the buying choices of customers. It is about getting them to show interest in your product and services. And data is the secret sauce here. The better and deeper you dive into customer and social media data, the better can you design your marketing campaigns. If you are still not leveraging Big Data and Data Science technologies to streamline your marketing strategies, you better start now!
Source: thebusinesstactics.com
