How to Integrate Data Science Into Your Marketing

It’s a new dawn, a new era, you can’t afford to be caught with your pants down. Data science is the in-thing. The size of your business shouldn’t be an excuse, integrate now.

If you still believed in trying to attract customers only by taking out full-page advertisements in magazines, plastering the town with bright billboards, and even signing up glamorous celebrities for television commercials, you must be operating from another planet and you do have another think coming. Marketing these days has moved to another level and brands are overly becoming more effective, extracting value from data by automating and optimizing processes or producing actionable insights.  Forbes reports that 91 percent of senior marketers indicated that information gathered on customer was essential to making decisions.

The interesting thing is that you have all along had all these data for the asking but failed to utilize the begging opportunity. Data is growing faster than ever before and by the year 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet. But according to a report, less than 0.5 percent of all data is analyzed and used

You, however, still can avail yourself of the unlimited, vast amount, and variety of information, to train models more effectively and recommend the product to your customers with more precision. It’s no longer a hidden fact that data science insights are connected to marketing results.

How do you go about the integration?

1. Homogenize consumers

Consumers come in shades and colors but most often, they have some intrinsic things in common. By aggregating and segregating, you will be able to discover what they have in common.

Demographic information you have been able to gather about your consumers will place you in a good stead to reach out to the right audiences and minimize wastages. Consumers are then segmented into homogenous groups.

This helps craft a single value proposition, create, and structure a market well. But this needs data which is at your easy reach. The more the merrier.

With Data Science, you can very effectively and with precision constitute segments based on a variety of factors such as consumption pattern, search history, purchase lifecycle, and social media behavior.

2. Ensure free flow of data among departments

Data science can’t take into account information it doesn’t have. Department- or division-wide silos put up barriers where they shouldn’t exist, blocking one department from receiving data from another that could be valuable.

Kirill Eremenko, the founder and CEO of SuperDataScience, an online educational portal for both data scientists and science enthusiasts, says “Extracting insights is the first step, but the crucial follow-up is finding ways to communicate and contextualize those insights so they’re accessible to all.”

Once these barriers are avoided, you have created room for your platforms to integrate and share data. Enhance the sustenance of systems to report data from one segment to another.

3. Customize your message

What every marketer sets out to do is to get the message right. Data Science has made it possible for you to craft just the message that a consumer is most likely to respond to. And do multiple copy testing in real time scenario to know which delivers better ROI.

It allows for customization of messages like never before – for the individual, the media, and the brand. The old practice had always created a scenario where marketing campaigns are too broadly distributed. As a result, they become inefficient for your budget and goals.

But with data science, you can understand which demographics and locations are giving you the highest ROI.

4. Arm yourself with the latest data

You can only win a war if you are a step ahead of your adversaries in terms of arsenals. This is the same situation in marketing. You need to be ahead of your competitors. Leverage any competitive advantage and utilize it to the fullest.

Data has to be timely to be actionable — or, at the very least, it needs to include information from the past through the present to highlight patterns and trends. The focus should be on fresh ones so your decisions are made based on what’s best for your current market.

Your decisions, content, ideas, and product are stale if your information is stale.

From whichever angle you view it, you must realize that context is important, too. Creating entire trails or streams of data will allow your marketing team to see that a product that sold well last winter and dismally this winter may be influenced by bigger factors you’re also tracking, such as economic downturns or a declining audience segment.

Data science taps into the information that’s already out there, the information that’s pointing the way a trend is headed. And it’s just the beginning. It will help integrate marketing with other disciplines better, deeper, easier, and faster. The future is all seamless!

The bottom line is, are you geared up for this phenomenal transformation?

Photo Credit: Universität Salzburg (NaWi-AV-Studio) Flickr via Compfight cc