The data-driven marketing sector is rapidly growing and data analytics tools are emerging that provide businesses with deep dives into their data to improve their business decisions.

Over the next five years, data-driven marketing will become a more integral part of most companies’ revenue strategies.  The need for data and data analysts will increase in all disciplines — from sales and market research to finance and IT — as companies realize how important it is for their organization’s growth.

Companies that do not keep up with the data-driven revolution run the risk of falling behind as competitors use data insights to gain an advantage.  However, those that embrace the changes now will be able to compete much more effectively over the next few years. New advancements in technology such as data storage, data collection, and data interpretation will continue to drive data-driven marketing.  As data becomes more readily available with greater speed and less cost, companies will be able to take advantage of this data as a competitive advantage. The demand for data-savvy professionals is growing rapidly as data analysis becomes an increasingly important part of marketing strategy.

It’s Time To Pay Attention to Your Data

For those businesses that do not already have the infrastructure in place to capture and analyze their data, it could make sense to purchase or license a data analytics platform (Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free) and hire one or two analysts (either staff or contractors) who can help interpret the insights discovered through the analysis process. At first, you might want to start small — perhaps by analyzing campaign reports, but over time you should consider expanding data analytics to include data that can be collected from customer interactions across all channels, including but not limited to heat-mapping data, data regarding retention and engagement with your product or service, data regarding the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, data regarding how customers are interacting with your social media accounts, data regarding activity on your website and data regarding what you should do next.

The use of data-driven marketing is not just for large businesses.  Even if you are a very small company or a one-man consultant, there’s still a lot that you can do to effectively apply data analytics to improve your business growth strategy.  Particularly if you have access to self-service tools (See Google links above), which allow users to find insights themselves without needing assistance from an expert data analyst.

Where to Find Your Data

For example, by using Google AdWords’ data tools, “data analyst” can quickly find data on how many people are looking for their company’s products or services as well as data on the keywords that those searchers are using.  By checking data from paid advertising campaigns against data from organic search engine results, a data analyst can discover which keywords and search engine optimization strategies are most effective for your business.

Although there is a lot of data available today, there is also a great deal still unknown.  This means that companies will need to collect more data going forward in order to improve their decisions.   As more data becomes available across marketing disciplines, businesses will be able to make better-informed decisions regarding the best ways to grow their sales and customer base.

Some of the challenges that data-driven marketers face include data collection, data interpretation, and data storage.  The ability to solve these problems will make data-driven marketing a more integral part of the business strategy going forward.

Conclusion

Industry experts predict that data analytics spending over the next five years will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22 percent, reaching a global total of $125 billion by 2022.  This means that many companies will need data analysts to help them understand how their data can be used to increase sales and grow customer bases.   By 2020, there were 2.7 million data analyst job openings in the U.S., which is twice as many openings as there were in 2012 according to research from IBM.    With data-driven marketing becoming a focus for more and more marketers, data analysts will be in high demand for the foreseeable future.  If data analysis is part of your future strategy, make sure that you keep up to date with data analytics to maintain your competitive advantage.