Corporate success is often hampered by conflicting goals—marketing wants more leads while sales want better leads. Sound familiar? It’s an age-old battle many companies struggle to remedy.

Fortunately, the key to satisfying both teams’ goals is simpler than you think—its data! Consider the following:

• 78% of organizations say data-driven marketing increases lead conversion and customer acquisition (source)
• 64% of marketing executives “strongly agree” that data-driven marketing is crucial to success in a hypercompetitive global economy (source)
• 66% of marketing leaders have seen an increase in new customers as a result of data-driven initiatives (source)

There’s no denying that data-driven marketing delivers higher levels of customer engagement and market growth than traditional marketing efforts. Today, we teach you how.

What is Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing is the ability to analyze your existing data, understand what’s missing, how to segment it and apply it to your marketing campaigns. This may sound simple enough, but the process of analyzing marketing data can be a daunting task for those who don’t have a grasp on the data collection, maintenance, and aggregation processes.

Ultimately, the goal of data-driven marketing is to identify important trends within your campaigns and customer base in an effort to cater to customer and prospect preferences.

For example: After analyzing your database, you realize that 20% of your contacts are financial advisors. From there, you segment your email list and send a highly targeted email campaign to this audience using messaging that resonates specifically with financial advisors. That’s data-driven marketing.

For a more in-depth look at data-driven marketing, start here: Data-Driven Marketing Benchmarks for Success.

How Does a Data-Driven Approach Impact Lead Conversion?

When executed correctly, data-driven marketing initiatives can increase lead quality and quantity—making it easier for your sales reps to close more deals.

Let’s take a closer look at the steps you can take to utilize data as part of your overall marketing efforts:

Identify your best buyers: With access to customer data and insights, you become able to identify the characteristics that make up your best buyers—or buyer personas. The key to data-driven marketing is to tailor your campaigns to your buyer personas. Start here to create yours: Steps to Creating Buyer Persona Profiles

Personalize outreach: Your prospects and customers want offers that speak to their specific needs and pain points. In fact, in a study of 650 multi-channel marketing campaigns, personalized campaigns consistently and overwhelmingly beat out static campaigns in generating a high response rate from recipients.

Score your leads: Assign a value to leads based on the likelihood that the person is going to buy your product or service. This value should be calculated based on data points like job title, industry, company, and more. Once you understand what makes a good lead, you can work to attract similar prospects. According to one study, 68% of “highly effective and efficient” marketers pointed to lead scoring as a top revenue contributor.

Implement nurture campaigns: Form relationships with prospects at every level of the buying process and nurture these relationships with better segmentation and targeted content. That way, when a prospect becomes ready to buy, your brand is top-of-mind. Learn how to start a data-driven nurture program here: The B2B Marketer’s Guide to Lead Nurturing.

Ultimately, customer and prospect data can fine-tune every aspect of a marketer’s strategy; from campaign type to audience, to the language you use. Although a data-driven marketing strategy starts with the marketing team, it’s a company-wide effort that requires time, expertise, and resources from many departments within an organization.

Data-driven marketing is never ‘done’. It’s an ongoing process that changes all the time; what resonates with your prospects today might change tomorrow. The beauty of data is that it will inform your decisions along the way and keep you ahead of the game.

If you liked this post, check out our Guide to Customer Relationship Management.

About the Author

Contributed by Molly Clarke, Web Marketing Manager at ZoomInfo. ZoomInfo offers the most accurate and actionable B2B data to help organizations accelerate growth and profitability. The continuously updated database enables sales and marketing teams to execute more effective marketing campaigns and improve lead generation efforts. Visit zoominfo.com for more information.