Data-driven Growth Marketing: The Path to Success [With Examples]

The road to success is paved with data.

Data is everywhere. And marketers have more data at their fingertips than ever before.

With the collection of data, your business can personalize its marketing and reach potential customers organically. And personalization is the name of the game in a buyer’s world.

Companies that employ data-driven personalization deliver 5-8 times ROI on marketing spend.

But how do you use data and personalization effectively? 87% of marketers consider data their organization’s most underutilized asset. So clearly, there’s still some hesitation or perhaps a lack of understanding of how crucial data-driven design and marketing are.

This blog post will show why data-driven marketing is essential to your overall strategy and show examples of successful data-driven marketing plays that you can use for inspiration today.

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The Path to Success: Data-Driven Growth Marketing

Data-driven marketing uses customer information and insights to optimize brand communication. As mentioned above, customers want a personalized experience. Marketers can use insights from interactions, surveys, and other available data to engage with customers and anticipate their needs and desires.

The crucial process of collecting data and using it to maximum effect yields the highest marketing return on investment (ROI). Take a look at these statistics:

Companies that adopt data-driven marketing are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year.
65% of B2B buyers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalize communications to them.
94% of buyers have discontinued communications with a company because of irrelevant messaging.

Using data and personalization is more important than ever. With a robust CRM, you can store customer information and use it to provide personalized engagement and outreach. You can predict customer behavior and characteristics and apply scoring attributes when a contact completes an action. The possibilities with data are endless.

You need to follow a process to make the most out of data. That process leads to the north star metric of any company: growth.

Find value: Combine internal and external data to identify and prioritize growth opportunities across the buyer journey, from awareness to acquisition, and retention to referral.
Build a strategy: Start with a data-driven approach to prioritize growth opportunities, using the right resources and focusing on quality leads and ROI.
Multiple touchpoints: Align prospects and customers across channels and touchpoints in the flywheel to drive conversion and maximize ROI.
Sales system: Provide relevant and complete insights to sales teams, join forces, and actively monitor progress across campaigns.
Optimize: Gather and act upon insights - be willing to experiment, be agile, and improve the system over time.

For this process to be successful, you must develop a growth mindset.

Always be Curious

When you capture customer information at every stage of the buying process, you build a goldmine of data. You can tailor your approach to each customer from their first interaction, how they engage with your content, and how they respond to marketing messages.

We no longer need to guess what our customers want and need; we just need to know where to look and what to ask. So much data is available, from browsing patterns and the amount of time they spend on specific pages on your website to social media activity.

Be curious about your buyers’ behavior, goals, pain points, and problems, and develop marketing campaigns that cater to their needs. Remember that they start looking for answers once they know they have a problem. Take them on a journey: here’s how you can solve your problem, and here’s how we can help you.

Curiosity must be genuine. You must want to truly help your customer, not just make a sale. That involves interacting with them when and where they want and providing resources that position you as the company that can help.

So much data is available: browsing patterns, length of time on specific pages on your website, and social media activity.

Example: Adobe

Adobe uses the customer journey to inform its marketing strategies. They defined a customer journey flow and created a targeted experience.

Adobe discovered that the customer journey isn’t linear. Interactions happen at any time and on any platform. With Adobe Experience Cloud, you can create customer experiences and use real-time data, scalable personalization, and more.

Without experiencing it themselves, Adobe wouldn’t have created the Adobe Experience Platform.

Continuously Improve Customer Experience

Once a customer is a customer, you might think you can move on to new leads and let your product do the talking. But one of the best ways to increase revenue is to re-sell, upsell and cross-sell to your current customers.

If a customer has a great experience with your product or service, they will tell their peers or anyone struggling with the same problem you’ve solved. The last thing you want is for them to say, “Their product worked, but their support sucked!”

A fantastic way to engage customers is with satisfaction surveys. Ask what you’re doing right and what you’re not doing, and identify areas of improvement.

Another critical factor is to make your omnichannel experience consistent. From social media conversations to website inquiry forms, customers should receive the same information and have the same experiences.

Talking of support, you can provide convenient, responsive support across platforms using chatbots and 24-hour chat. And data should be stored and ready to go in real-time. Use dashboards to display data, so support agents don’t need to ask customers to explain their issues multiple times.

Example: Hyatt

Hyatt, the hotel chain, boasts high customer satisfaction. In the past ten years, they consistently scored above average in surveys and put it down to customer input. They focus on customer feedback to develop their brand.

They regularly use social media and feedback forms to shape the customer experience. They actively encourage customers to share their experiences and use relevant hashtags on social media.

They have a solid online presence, making it easy for customers and guests to communicate with them.

Personalize Your Customers’ Website Experience

How do your customers engage with your website? Do you know? Do you know how long they spend on each page? Do you know what happened after they clicked on your call-to-action button?

Using past interactions, you can see how your customers engage with your website and at what stages during the buying process. Instead of providing a broad experience, you can offer customers a unique experience tailored to their needs.

People have become accustomed to a personalized experience. For example, retail stores with brick and mortar premises and online stores regularly provide shoppers with personalized recommendations, loyalty programs, and special offers.

On your website, you might optimize your copy and images to align with a customer’s interests and intent. You can set up landing pages based on social media interactions. You can even use email marketing and conversations to direct users to a specific page.

Example: HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy is an online course library that provides marketing, sales, and customer service education. Their courses are interactive, promote co-learning (through group discussions), and teach users how to use HubSpot to effectively market and make sales.

Based on the courses someone takes, HubSpot recommends similar or more advanced courses. The page greets users by name, and the dashboard is labeled ‘My education.’

Engage With Your Customers

We’ve nailed home the importance of collecting data and customer information. But it’s no use having all that data if you don’t engage with customers. You have to be proactive and ensure you respond to social media posts and comments, reply to emails promptly, and make it easy for your customers to reach you.

Where your customers are in their buyer journey will affect how you best engage with them. For example, once they’ve defined a problem, you can provide demo videos, free trials, case studies, and testimonials to show how they can solve their problem with your product or service.

Once a customer, go above their expectations. Be human. Be helpful. Part of personalization is reaching out to customers and asking about their experiences. In exchange, you can send relevant offers and discounts.

Lastly, loyalty rewards are the best practice. Show your customers you appreciate them and want to thank them. Loyal customers are more likely to evangelize for your brand.

Example: Nike

“Digital is infusing every element of our consumers’ lives. So whether it’s a Nike Training Club, Nike Run Club, our activity apps or the SNKRS app or the Nike mobile app, consumers have led us to that and we’ve tried to make sure we’re right there with them in all aspects of their lives.”

Nike CEO John Donahoe

Nike knows that its customers are online. All the time. So Nike shows up where they are. They understand that their customers want individuality and to be understood and respected for who they are. Personalization plays a role in their needs and desires.

Nike leans on its NikePlus membership to engage with its customers. The NikePlus membership program unlocks various benefits, including special rewards for workouts, customized Apple Music playlists, and personalized promotions.

They have the Nike Training app, the Nike Running app, and even a sneaker app. Multiple touch points and opportunities exist to engage with customers and build a community.

Build a Culture of Experimentation

The best way to make the most use of data is to build a culture of experimentation in your marketing efforts. You’ll need to adopt a growth marketing mindset. With so much data at your fingertips, use it to inform campaigns, deliver a better customer experience, and maximize marketing dollars.

Validate what works and what doesn’t. You can afford to experiment and then double down on an effort or pivot to different strategies. Collecting and analyzing data and then combining them with action is the best practice. For example, you can use A/B testing and multivariate testing.

Sound overwhelming or stuck with where to start? Keep it simple. It could be as simple as changing a button’s position or the text. You might test different headlines to see how it affects conversions. As you become more familiar with testing, you might make tests more complex, like sending personalized offers to segments of your list.

Lastly, test your most important user flows and look for gaps in performance and processes. This granular approach puts you on the path to success.

Example: Groove

Groove is a shared inbox for small businesses seeking an alternative to email. They were struggling with their messaging and wanted a landing page that would convert. Unhappy with their conversion rate; they set about improving it.

They learned everything they could and spoke to experts. But the gold was in talking to their current and new customers. Finding out why their customers signed up, what drove them to buy, and discovering trends led to a focus on copy over design.

The aesthetically pleasing page with jumbled messaging and too much marketing speech converted at 2.3%. Their new page that focuses on the copy that speaks to their customers’ needs and desires converts at 4.7%. Just over double the number of conversions!

Data-Driven Growth Marketing is a Long-Term Strategy

The main focus of data-driven marketing is using the data you collect to provide personalized and relevant service to your customers. It might seem overwhelming to collect, store, and curate customer data, but with platforms like HubSpot, you can have all your data in one place.

Lean Labs are an extension of your sales and marketing teams, working with your team to attract your target customers to your website, convert qualified leads, and nurture those leads into opportunities.

We use Hubspot with all our clients to make the most out of data and help you provide personalized experiences for your customers. Our clients discover how to interpret and leverage data to produce optimized and more cost-effective results.

Want to learn more about how we can help you? Book a Growth Mapping session today!