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Today’s marketers have more data about their consumers at their fingertips than ever before. Marketers who use these insights to create a data-driven strategy drive the best results. Consider these statistics:
In this post, we’ll break down the definition of data-driven marketing, current trends, the data you need to create a data-driven marketing strategy, and how you should update your approach.
Data-driven marketing is a marketing strategy that uses data — acquired through consumer interactions and third parties — to gain a better view into consumers’ motivations, preferences, and behaviors. Marketers then create personalized messaging and experiences that deliver the highest possible return on investment (ROI).
Traditional marketing and data-driven marketing represent two distinct approaches to reaching and engaging customers. While both aim for positive results, the methods they employ differ significantly. Let’s explore these key differences:
Traditional marketing often employs a one-size-fits-all approach, delivering generic messages to a broad audience. This blanket strategy can feel impersonal and less effective in capturing customer interest. Without considering individual preferences, or needs, traditional marketing struggles to create a meaningful connection with a business’s target audience.
Data-driven marketing flips the script by tailoring messages to individual customers. By using detailed customer data, marketers can create highly personalized experiences that resonate at a deeper level. Personalization fosters a stronger connection with customers, increasing engagement and loyalty.
Determining the exact return on investment (ROI) of your department’s efforts can be challenging in traditional marketing. The lack of precise tracking tools makes it difficult to measure the impact of your campaigns accurately. As a result, justifying marketing expenditures or optimizing strategies won’t be easy.
Data-driven marketing offers a clear advantage in this area. With advanced analytics and attribution models, marketers can meticulously track customer journeys, measure campaign performance, and identify which marketing efforts generate the highest returns. A data-driven approach provides valuable insights into which marketing channels and tactics are most effective, enabling businesses to optimize their spending.
Traditional marketing often relies on intuition, experience, and historical data when making strategic decisions. While these factors are valuable, they can be limited without concrete data to support them. Without hard data, marketing strategies may be less effective and responsive to customer needs.
Data-driven marketing relies on real-time data and analytics to inform decision-making. By leveraging insights from customer behavior, market trends, and campaign performance, marketers can make data-informed decisions that drive better results. This then allows them to capitalize on new opportunities and optimize marketing strategies for maximum impact.
Traditional marketing typically takes a generalized approach to engaging customers, relying on mass media channels to reach a wide audience. This broad approach may contribute to your business’s brand awareness, but can lack the targeted focus needed to build strong customer relationships. Without a deep understanding of your customers’ needs or preferences, traditional marketing struggles to build strong relationships and drive customer loyalty.
Data-driven marketing enables marketers to create highly targeted and relevant engagement strategies. By understanding customer preferences, behaviors, and needs, your efforts can deliver personalized experiences that foster deeper connections and drive lasting customer loyalty.
By harnessing the vast swathes of data at their disposal, businesses can transform how they connect with customers and drive results. This knowledge empowers marketers to make informed decisions, optimize their strategies, and ultimately drive more revenue.
Let’s delve into some of the specific benefits:
While data-driven marketing offers immense potential, implementing a successful strategy is not without its challenges. From data collection to analysis and interpretation, numerous hurdles can impede progress. Let's explore some of the common obstacles businesses face:
64% of marketing executives “strongly agree” that data-driven marketing is crucial in today’s landscape. Below are some of the most important trends to consider when forming your strategy.
Regulations like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act have cut down on marketers’ ability to capture and use third-party data. In addition, Firefox, Safari, Bing, and Chrome, which together control over 90% of the browser market share, have each stated that they intend to tighten privacy restrictions in the future.
In response, marketers are turning to first-party data — data that they’ve captured from their own audience. As restrictions on third-party data continue to tighten, first-party data will only become more important.
Today’s consumer journey is more fractured than ever before. In fact, a recent study from Google found that today’s consumer journey can have between 20-500 touchpoints, depending on the complexity of the purchase.
In addition, consumers have higher expectations for their experiences than ever before. It’s critical that your data-driven approach unifies disparate channels and creates a cohesive brand experience for each consumer. Failing to do so will lose you their business.
This makes it doubly important to have proper attribution for your marketing channels and touchpoints. With so many different brand interactions happening in each consumer journey, you need to isolate which marketing programs are truly moving the needle and impacting revenue so you can invest more heavily in them.
As marketers capture first-party data from more touchpoints than ever, consumers expect great experiences in return. In fact, 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
It’s critical that your data-driven approach unifies disparate channels and creates a cohesive brand experience for each consumer. Failing to do so will lose you their business.
In 2023, you can’t rely on unrequited brand loyalty. Marketers have to ensure that they deliver a seamless experience to every customer on every channel — otherwise, they’re only a click or call away from choosing a competitor. In a recent study, 32% of customers said they stop doing business with a brand they love after only one bad experience.
The phone call experience, in particular, can make or break brand loyalty. If you quickly connect consumers to the right person to meet their needs, you’ll be more likely to win their business. If you keep them waiting, you may lose them forever. In fact, 59% of customers hang up within 10 minutes of being placed on hold.
Integrating your marketing data tools will give your entire department a single source of truth. When you want your prospects to follow a certain path to become customers, integrating your tools will allow you to guide them more seamlessly. Your department will be better aligned because the information they’re relying on is centralized. Integration also helps eliminate data silos because it makes it easier to understand how your initiatives are performing, how the budget is being allocated, and how effectively your resources are being utilized.
Forget the personalization struggle bus! Marketers are jumping into the AI fast lane, using it for everything from sniper-targeted ads to mind-reading websites. Our recent study revealed that nearly all marketers (93%) are investing in AI this year, and for good reason:
Talk about seeing results! The takeaway? AI isn't a trend, it's a survival tactic. Invest wisely, leverage our report's insights, and join the AI revolution to create unforgettable customer experiences.
You can learn more about our findings in our full State of AI in Digital Marketing Report.
As mentioned above, with recent third-party data restrictions, marketers are shifting to first-party data sources. In fact, a recent survey found that 82% of marketers plan to increase their use of first-party data.
Below are some of the most valuable sources of first-party insights that data-driven marketers are leveraging in 2025.
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce are a powerful source of insights. A CRM gathers customer interactions across all channels into one centralized location. With CRM data, you can segment your audience based on all their past interactions with your brand and tailor their experiences to align with their journey and buying intent.
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics capture data about consumers’ interactions on your website. With this information, you can personalize their experiences based on the pages they visited and online goals they completed.
Similar to your website, your mobile app can give you deep insights into your consumers’ interactions with your brand. Google Analytics 4 offers new features that make it easier than ever to capture mobile app data. You can now see how users spend their time on your app, their favorite features, common conversion paths, and much more. You then can use this data to optimize your app’s performance and personalize user experiences.
Capturing and leveraging data from transactions is critical. By understanding what consumers have purchased, you can predict what they would be inclined to purchase in the future and tailor their experience accordingly.
In addition to understanding consumers’ online interactions with your brand, it’s critical to understand how they’re engaging with you over the phone. Call tracking and conversation intelligence solutions like Invoca connect each phone call to the marketing source that drove it, so you can understand the messaging and channels driving calls. Invoca also uses AI to analyze the content of conversations at scale, so you can understand if it was a sales lead, the caller’s buying intent, the caller’s urgency, if the caller converted, and more. These fill a critical blind spot and allow you to personalize consumer experiences based on phone conversations — in addition to online interactions.
You can integrate call tracking and analytics data with CRMs like Salesforce, web analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, as well as a host of other tools in your martech stack.
Remember the days when "knowing your audience" meant slapping a generic demographic label on them? Those days are over. Today's consumers are nuanced, multifaceted individuals, and crafting truly impactful marketing requires a deeper understanding that goes beyond age, income, and location.
That's where the power of conversation intelligence comes in. While demographics offer a starting point, phone conversations hold rich, insightful, and qualitative data that reveals your audience's true needs, desires, and pain points. Think of it as a focus group happening organically within your business — a goldmine of data waiting to be unearthed. Using AI to analyze call recordings can reveal gems like:
This deeper understanding unlocks the genuine personalization your marketing needs. Craft messaging that resonates on a personal level, address their specific concerns directly, and anticipate their needs before they even arise. It's like having a direct line into their minds, allowing you to create marketing that truly connects and converts.
Have you ever purchased a product and then been targeted, all across the internet, with ads for that product? This poor experience not only annoys customers, but it’s also a waste of valuable ad spend.
To avoid this mistake, and to ensure you’re targeting consumers as accurately as possible, you should capture all your customer data in a centralized location, like a CRM. This way, you’ll be able to target them based on every touchpoint they engage with as they move through the funnel.
With this complete view of each customer, not only will you avoid serving irrelevant ads, you’ll also be able to target more precisely. For example, if you integrate call tracking and analytics data into your strategy, you can target callers with ads based on the content of their phone conversations. If a caller expressed interest in a particular product but didn’t convert, you could retarget them with ads for that product. If they expressed urgency, you could increase your bidding to ensure consumers with the highest purchase potential are seeing your ads. If they bought a product or service, you could target them with ads for a relevant companion purchase, or exclude them from seeing ads to conserve spend.
Email is an effective channel to reach your existing customers and those who’ve made accounts on your website or subscribed to your content — and it’s free. But to effectively utilize it, you need to accurately segment your contacts. This can be best achieved in a CRM.
You can segment your audience in a variety of ways, depending on your marketing goals. For example, if you’re a lawn care provider, you could segment your audience based on their past purchases. If they purchased a basic fertilization package, you could target them with emails promoting a complete package that includes aeration, insect control, weed control, and more.
You could also segment your audience based on when they purchased from you. Certain lawn care services need to be performed seasonally or at regular intervals, and you could target them with emails promoting the right services at the right times.
Another strategy is to use your call tracking and analytics data to segment your audience based on the content of their phone conversations. Continuing with the lawn care example, if callers asked about a “total care” package but didn’t convert, you could retarget them with emails for that service. If they expressed price sensitivity, your emails could include a limited-time discount code.
Your web visitors have engaged with your website in different ways and are at different stages of the funnel. Each should receive a dynamic website experience tailored to their needs and past interactions.
A common example of this is using visitors’ past history on your website to populate a custom “Recommendations” carousel. This way, products they’ve recently viewed or companion products for their purchases will show up front and center on your webpages. You can also make more complex optimizations, like adjusting site copy and images to align with their interests and intent.
You can also use other data sources to inform website personalization. For instance, you can optimize consumers’ website experiences based on what they said on phone conversations. To do this, you can push call tracking data into website optimization platforms. You can then set up people-based website personalization rules for certain phrases or data points that occurred in the conversations. The optimization tools will, in turn, deliver website personalized experiences that align with phone conversations — at scale.
For example, if you’re an auto dealer, you can populate your homepage with an image of the vehicle the buyer expressed interest in over the phone, but did not schedule a test drive for. To sweeten the deal, you could add a special financing offer.
In addition to using data-driven processes to improve online experiences, it’s critical to apply these same principles to call experiences. Each caller has different needs and buying intent — you should quickly connect them with a relevant agent who is equipped to meet their needs and convert them. Failing to do so could cost you their business.
To execute this strategy, marketers are using dynamic call routing rules, which automatically route callers based on certain criteria. Below are some common call routing optimizations:
Marketers are also using AI-powered reports to evaluate how well their locations are answering and converting calls. These reports, generated by a call tracking and analytics solution, show the sales calls driven to each location, the lead score of the calls, the call conversion rates, and the percentage of calls that go to voicemail. They can then use that data to coordinate with sales to improve call experiences at their locations.
When revenue goals aren’t met, marketing and sales teams often point fingers at each other. Marketing may say it was driving quality leads but sales was fumbling them, while sales may say those leads weren’t so hot to begin with. To solve this common problem and improve collaboration, marketers and sales teams are using conversation intelligence solutions.
With conversation intelligence, marketers can quantify not just the number of calls their campaigns drive — but the quality of those calls. They can then share this data with the sales team to improve transparency and accountability.
Sales teams can use solutions like Invoca to see how many qualified phone leads agents are converting. They can also use the recordings and transcriptions to understand how they can help agents and business locations improve their performance. This helps them make the most of the valuable phone leads marketing is sending.
With conversation intelligence, marketing and sales teams have a unified view of the call channel that they can use to drive stronger collaboration, better experiences, and, ultimately, more revenue.
When you enact a data-driven marketing strategy, you need to keep a keen eye on the security and compliance of your tactics, particularly when handling sensitive customer data. When you invest in a new platform to assist with your marketing programs, you'll want to make sure it's compliant with all applicable laws and regulations, such as:
Invoca maintains all of the above certifications, but compliance isn't just a checkbox for us. We go beyond industry standards with proactive security measures, regular penetration testing, and ongoing employee training. It's a continuous commitment to earning your trust and safeguarding your data every step of the way. Learn more about Invoca's enterprise-grade security compliance measures here.
Imagine a healthcare giant like Banner Health, serving diverse patient populations across states. Does delivering personalized experiences for each individual sound like a daunting task? By embracing data-driven marketing with Invoca's HIPAA-compliant platform, Banner Health achieved just that, transforming the patient journey and decreasing cost per acquisition.
Banner Health uses Invoca to see how many appointment calls each marketing campaign drives to track their true ROI. This allows them to double down on what’s working and cut spend on underperforming campaigns.
They also use Invoca to segment audiences, including: loyal patients, patients who visit intermittently, and new patients. This helps to inform their bidding strategy — for instance, they can increase bids on new patients to prioritize acquisition and reduce bids on loyal patients who are likely to return.
As a result of these efforts, Banner Health achieved the following results:
"Invoca has been a game-changer for our team. It allows us to maximize one of our most valuable resources: our marketing dollars," said Chris Pace, Chief Digital Marketing Officer at Banner Health.
Read the full Banner Health case study here
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you enhance your data-driven marketing strategy? Check out these resources:
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