Study: Data-Driven Marketing Drives Engagement and Market Growth

A recent Forbes/Turn study has found that organizations that are “leaders” in data-driven marketing report far higher levels of customer engagement and market growth than their “laggard” counterparts.

The annual study divided more than 330 executive-level respondents into three groups, based on usage of data:

• Laggards (21% of group): doesn’t collect data or analytics for marketing and don’t plan to in the future. They have no formal digital marketing efforts under way. 
• Dabblers (11%): has begun to incorporate data into some phases of their marketing process, but lack the skills and vision to see returns. 
• Contenders (26%): regularly uses analytics for making and measuring decisions. Efforts are under way to bring customer-facing channels together with common data and applications.
• Leaders (11%):  always measures results with analytics, strive to make data-driven decisions, and actively transform personnel roles to be more digitally savvy.

Based on these groups, the study then measured how their efforts utilizing and analyzing data as part of a marketing strategy translated into better customer loyalty, engagement, and overall market growth. They found that the Leaders, the top of the group, had three times better results (74% vs. 24%) than the Laggards, which were the least active of the group.

Utilizing data has also helped leaders and other groups from the survey who are getting more involved in data-driven marketing achieve big results. Some of these included:

As the graph above shows, actively data-driven organizations reported that they had a competitive advantage in several key areas, including customer loyalty (47%), gaining new customers (43%), and higher customer satisfaction (42%) and retention (41%).

To download a PDF version of the study, fill out the info form here.

Graph made via screenshot from mentioned Forbes/Turn study. Featured image via pixabay.