These days, the highly competitive business world and dynamic nature of customers call for data-driven marketing in the modern marketing setting. As a result, businesses can optimize big data to get insights into customer shopping patterns and smoothen operations. And with this understanding, companies can have well-targeted marketing campaigns and personalized services for the better satisfaction of customer needs.
Some of the tools that marketers commonly use include business intelligence platforms and data analytics dashboards to guide their efforts. With these tools, they can do advanced data analysis and get vital business insights.
Unfortunately, some businesses cannot fully evaluate the tools when acquiring them, resulting in poor buying decisions or underutilization of the various features that come with them. Moreover, some companies are stuck with redundant systems, which bring inefficiency and increase costs. However, a business can focus on some key features while purchasing the tools to better customer service, enhance brand perception, and improve decision making.
Below are some of the qualities that data-driven marketing tools should have:
Real-Time Insights
While it was acceptable in gone days for marketers to assess marketing campaigns several weeks after their launch, these days, they have to evaluate the campaigns as they happen and react quickly to the feedback. One key feature of a good data-driven marketing tool is the capacity to evaluate and optimize marketing drives while in progress. As such, marketers can sharpen their target while picking up useful customer data.
There must be an automated input of data between sources like social media pages and the tool, resulting in timely data to have real-time insights. The perfect tools visualize the data to overcome information overload so that the marketer can gauge the initiatives’ success even with a quick look. If you need the best data driven marketing tools, you can contact the leaders in offering these solutions to get top-notch tools tailored to your business.
Data Quality Assurance
Marketers use data from many sources, and its quality may not always be guaranteed. Any data for marketing decisions must exhibit dimensions of timeliness, accuracy, consistency, and others. Although efforts are extended to ensure high-quality data like getting it from reliable vendors, a good tool should have basic features to offer the necessary data quality assurance. That way, the campaigns can target the right audience or customers and the data can enable marketers and top management to make informed decisions.
Data Assimilation
The use of numerous data technologies in a company can lead to data silos where there many sets of data that only a department or a few users are privy to. This makes it hard for marketers to analyze all of them, resulting in incomplete business experience. Before acquiring data-driven marketing tools, the marketers should establish the types and number of data sources to integrate to ensure the needed assimilation is achieved. Failure to consider this could result in spending long hours trying to clean and manually bring together data from several sources.
Unified Measurement
Businesses receive marketing data from a myriad of sources and in different formats, making it quite complex. It can be a challenge for many data tools to measure the campaign data from the various touch points–both online and offline, and this could lead to wrong decisions and ruining the campaign. Good data-driven marketing tools should have the capability to get data from different sources in a consistent format for efficient consumption and processing by the analytic tools. This feature-unified marketing measurement ensures correct analysis of first-party data.
Sufficient Processing and Storage Capacity
Nowadays, marketers leverage larger volumes of data than they did in the past. As such, the tools should handle and store tons of data. This feature applies mainly to cloud-based tools because they offer limited storage or charge dearly for cloud storage and processing. What’s more is that marketers must ensure that the data storage location is secure and protected.
The tools must also be reasonably fast in processing data so marketers don’t have to wait for hours to get the insights. Top-notch tools come with features like data streams to consistently add data to the tool, allowing the businesses to visualize things on demand.
Data-driven marketing tools must help marketers to monitor marketing drives as they happen for the timely intervention. They should also have the capacity to store and process large volumes of data. Besides that, they should allow the integration of data from many sources to facilitate a holistic view of the business and decision making.