We’ve talked a fair bit recently about data-driven marketing. Now it’s time to discuss the next step: insight-driven marketing.
What is Insight Marketing
insight marketing is the practice of applying thinking to data in order to to turn it into an actionable and informed marketing strategy.
All successful marketing starts with a strategy. And a good strategy is based upon business intelligence and key market research. To achieve this you not only need data but human intellect too.
Data for data’s sake won’t help you formulate the best strategy. Insight marketing is less about data output and more about having a hypothesis to put this data to use. Thinking is key.
Ultimately, an insight-driven approach comes down to having a solid understanding of what insight you’ll need, why, and how to put the data to best use.
3 Key Insight Marketing Concepts
Central to insight driven marketing is using the data that you have gathered in order to create personalised and adaptive marketing messages. We touch on each of these concepts below.
Data
Robust data and customer research is central to insight-driven marketing.
There is a myriad of data now available about your target audience, beyond mere contact information. This includes demographics, purchase history, interests, and past engagements with your brand, be it with your website, social media, email or any other touchpoint.
Yet many businesses’ data is poor, incomplete and outdated. You may have more or less information than you need about your consumers. This is problematic when it comes to generating insights, and can result in wasted spend if you’re targeting the wrong audiences – or using the wrong strategies.
To become insight-driven, an organisation must first ensure that a sound data management strategy is in place. After all, the main difference between a data-driven approach to marketing and an insight-driven one is the ability to take information and actually use it to inform your marketing decisions.
Personalisation
Personalisation is a core outcome when applying thinking to data.
By taking an holistic view of the data that you have generated, you can begin to tailor your marketing strategies to your audience. For example, you can begin to segment your audiences accurately, crafting buyer personas and allowing you to refine the communication channels for each segment in the process.
This goes beyond the kind of tactics you might develop when looking at single pieces of data. While a data-driven approach may mean, for example, that you tailor your email marketing campaigns based on a recipients gender or location, an insight-driven approach means using the data to assess whether email marketing is even the best channel to reach this customer in the first place.
Adaptation
While you may be used to recording certain types of data as part of your customer database – job role, location, company, etc. – other forms of data may not be recorded. You need to look at the data you do have holistically – for personalisation – and to record the right data at the right time.
There are many ways consumers now interact with your business. To draw real insights from this, you’ll need a way of capturing these interactions in order to adapt your marketing messages.
For example, does your CRM system capture customer complaints? Suppose a customer phones to complain but they are already added into an automated email marketing campaign which will prompt them to leave a review about a recent purchase. In this case, you might want to prevent them receiving such messages based on their existing sentiment towards your business. This is just one way that data can drive insights that helps you adapt your marketing tactics.
Our Advanced Growth Framework takes exactly this insight-driven approach. It combines data-driven marketing with business intelligence and a tailored approach to create sustainable business growth.
Our Advanced Growth Framework does exactly this. It combines data-driven marketing with business intelligence and a tailored approach to create sustainable business growth.
Having a sound data-driven model should demonstrate the entire lifecycle of investment to conversion, but many tactical marketers think just because they track digital behaviour that the job is done.
This article is a reaction to below article:
http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2015/26832/why-moving-from-data-driven-marketing-to-insight-driven-marketing-makes-sense