Data-driven marketing: 26 Great ways to use consumer data

Data-driven marketing is the perfect way to level-up your marketing efforts for the modern, data-obsessed world. 

Marketing has moved on from being an ad in the local newspaper and flyers tucked under windscreen wipers. Now, we’ve got the power of data to take us to dizzying new heights – we can deliver our messages and showcase our products to hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom we know will be at least a little bit interested in what we have to say. 

But the truth is, there’s so much data out there that it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start. From lead scoring to content analytics, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of numbers that don’t really mean anything. In other words, you’re missing the insight – the ‘ah ha!’ moment that makes data-driven marketing such a stand-out success.

Why use consumer data for data-driven marketing?

At Attest, we know that the best place to look for those crucial insights that can make or break a brand is in consumer data. When you think about it, it’s really simple – if you want to know what’s working, and what will work, with your target audience, you need to go right to the source. We’re not talking about just your customers – we know there’s a big difference between customer and consumer data – but the world at large. 

So how can you use consumer data to create more effective marketing strategies, more compelling creatives, and more happy customers? We’ve compiled 26 ways to use consumer data in your data-driven marketing strategies: 

Data-driven marketing: brand tracking

Monitoring brand awareness across time

Want to understand if you have a healthy brand? One of the key brand health metrics you should be keeping an eye on is brand awareness – i.e. the number of people in a given population who don’t just recognize your brand, but are acutely aware of what it does. Using consumer data, you can measure both Prompted and Unprompted Brand Recall (e.g. “Have you heard of X brand?”, or, “Name a brand that comes to mind when you think of X category”). 

Monitoring this awareness over time is crucial to understanding the health of your brand and the success of your marketing efforts – if you run a huge, expensive awareness campaign, and brand awareness doesn’t increase in the weeks and months after it, you can be pretty sure that campaign wasn’t quite up to scratch, or your distribution strategy needs tweaking. Bringing these learnings into future planning is the key to a data-driven marketing campaign.

Keeping tabs on brand sentiment

Much like brand awareness, brand sentiment is a metric you should always keep a close eye on when it comes to understanding the health of your brand. Using consumer data and metrics like NPS and free text questions, you can get to grips with not just whether people know your brand exists, but also how they feel about it. 

Benchmarking against competitors

A big part of brand tracking is seeing how you stack up against competitors in your category. Brand tracking surveys don’t just give you insight into how your brand is doing, but also your competition. For example, if your competitor has higher brand awareness than your brand, but lower brand sentiment (i.e. people know the brand but don’t particularly like it), then you know exactly where to swoop in – boost your brand awareness and play up your key differentiators. If your competitors have super positive brand sentiment, then take some learnings from them and see where you can improve. That’s the power of data-driven marketing.

Data-driven marketing: creative testing

Validating concepts

Say you’ve got a winning idea for a new ad campaign. How do you prove that it has legs? How do you show key decision-makers that it really is a winning idea and isn’t going to fall flat? This is a perfect example of where consumer data is crucial – by validating your concepts and ideas before you invest the money and time from your creative team, you can make sure all of your concepts are winners.

Refining a winning idea

You’ve got the idea – now let’s get specific. Present multiple versions of campaign creative to your target consumers and let them help you narrow down to the very best one(s). By using consumer data to refine your creative, you’ll quickly learn what resonates with your desired audience and what doesn’t. 

Comparing creative reception across demographics and psychographics

Not everyone will respond to your creative in the same way, and that’s very much the case when it comes to different demographics. Use consumer data-driven marketing to refine your ideas for each group of the population, so you can communicate exactly what matters to them. 

It’s also useful to fold in a psychographic question or two when testing creative. Consider your personas – there are likely a number of defining psychographic elements that make them useful. If you have the ability to compare and contrast reception of your creative against key psychographic persona markers, you’ll be able to more easily optimise for success.

Testing moving across mediums

Not every ad or piece of creative will resonate the same way across mediums. De- risk moving across channels or mediums by incorporating consumer data into the plan, so when you move from TV to audio, or audio to print, or whichever way your creatives take you, you’ll know how it translates in a completely new medium. 

Spotting ad fatigue early

Sadly, one piece of creative or a cleverly-crafted ad campaign isn’t going to last you forever. Eventually, you’re going to need something new – but when? Use consumer data to spot when an ad is beginning to fatigue by contrasting it with something new – that way you can make the switch at the right time and prevent media spend that doesn’t translate into sales.

Gauging the reception of personalisation

Personalisation is generally seen as pretty helpful – or is it? It’s actually received very differently across demographics – our report found that the trend for personalisation in adverts is found ‘helpful’ by 77.3% of Gen Z, while 44.3% of baby boomers find that same technology ‘creepy’. Using consumer data is a great way to ensure you’re crafting the right campaigns for your target audience. 

Testing out packaging designs

Packaging serves an important purpose in marketing – it serves to attract attention to the product, and then to help sell it. Plenty of brands don’t make the most of their packaging design space, and some even get it disastrously wrong – and the best way to avoid that is to be data-driven from the very beginning. Test packaging designs with consumers before you send them into mass production to see which ones catch the eye best, and which would be most convincing on the shelf. 

Data-driven marketing: Expanding into new markets

Understanding which markets you should be in

Which markets will your brand be most successful in? If you don’t know, you should – and the easiest way to understand this is by checking in with consumers. In today’s digital economy, being able to successfully expand into new markets is crucial to brand growth – using market research tools, you can quickly assess which markets are right for you.

Altering messaging and creative across different markets

Not all markets will respond in the same way to the same messaging or creative. To make sure things translate, it’s essential to have an in-depth understanding of your target markets, and test your creatives with those exact consumers before you go live. 

Optimising spend and ROI

Apply learnings from consumer data to understand what works, uncover what’s missing, and maximise the effectiveness of new launches. That way, you’ll be able to easily attribute ROI to the right things and optimise spend on the things that work.

Data-driven marketing: campaign planning

Finding creative inspiration for ad campaigns

When you start incorporating consumer data into your campaign planning, you quickly uncover insights that conjure up new creative inspiration. Look for patterns, understand niche audiences, and use data-driven creativity to go above and beyond in your campaign planning exercises. 

Testing campaign creatives before they go live

Using consumer data to construct campaign strategies means you can be far more confident that they’ll land with your target audience. Test your design mockups, try out variations of messaging, and be certain that your campaign creatives will hit the right note. 

Optimising media spend

Get more data-driven with your media spend. Use consumer data to figure out the best ways to reach your target audience – which channels do they use? Which social media platforms are most trustworthy for them? What time of day do they consume the most media? All of this information is essential for data-driven media planning. You can also be incredibly reactive with spend these days, given how quickly you can get a read on which programmes and publications your audience is consuming.

Improving the performance of live campaigns

Once a campaign is live, how can you keep optimising it? You don’t need to wait until after a campaign has finished running to start measuring how well it did – why not start checking in with consumers a week or so into the campaign? That way you can see who’s been exposed to your campaign, how well they remember it, and whether you’re hitting the right demographics. Use that data to adjust campaigns as-you-go.

Using data to optimise future performance

There’s no reason why the performance of one campaign can’t influence your next one. In fact, you should always take your learnings from past campaigns into the creation of new ones – that way, you’ll always be optimising your performance. Use consumer data from one to feed into optimising the next.

Data-driven marketing: PR and content 

Creating data-driven stories that capture attention

Want to create some press for your brand (and gather valuable backlinks in the process)? Create data-driven content using consumer data – media outlets are huge fans of content with primary data and you have a much better chance of getting picked up for a PR spot with a unique, data-backed point of view.

Producing content that drives results

Consumer data doesn’t just make for interesting, valuable content – it can also help create it. By asking your target audience what content they’d like to see, or identifying knowledge gaps or emerging trends, you can incorporate that data into your content marketing strategy and start producing content that you know will be useful and relevant.

Data-driven marketing: consumer profiling

Understanding who your target audience is

Want to know if the people you’re targeting are really the right audience for your offering? Get to grips with your target audience, and then understand them even better by using consumer profiling surveys. Once you understand your audience, you’ll know where best to reach them, the kinds of creative that will resonate best with them, and, most importantly, why they’d be interested in what your brand has to offer.

Creating jobs to be done

What are your consumers’ pain points, and how can you help them fix them? With a jobs to be done survey, you can get to the heart of your consumers’ needs and the gap that you fill. 

Data-driven marketing: New Product Development

Building products that people actually want

The trick to being truly data-driven is to incorporate consumer data as early as possible in the process. When it comes to NPD, you should be reaching out to consumers before you’ve even come up with a product idea. Make sure you’re building products that people actually want – and the rest will be easy.

Optimising new product launches

Launching a new product is no small feat. Plenty of different things go into a successful launch, from the development of the product itself, to packaging design, to marketing to the right people. All of these intricate, interconnected stages can be optimised and bolstered through a great understanding of your target audience.

Attributing ROI to innovation

Attributing ROI is a notoriously difficult task, but if you can prove the efficacy of innovation, you’ll be able to innovate with confidence in the future. 

Going to market quicker than the rest

When it comes to innovation, speed is a gamechanger. Losing out on market share because you didn’t get there first can be a disaster for emerging brands, even if your product is significantly better than the one that took first place. Using consumer data, you can have more confidence in your decisions throughout the process, meaning you can get your product to market quicker than anyone else.

Want to get started with using consumer data-driven marketing? Then we have some great news for you: 

With Attest, you can do all 26 of these things – and we make it easy.

Book an intro with one of our experts who’ll walk you through exactly how you can use Attest’s innovative research platform, and find out how brands like Gymshark, Klarna, and WorldRemit use us to supercharge their marketing efforts.