The past decade of emerging technologies has evolved the way we think of marketing and data collection. Innovative disruption all across sectors is widely based on data and its analysis to reach the potential customer base. Changing global markets, pandemic and wars have all heavily relied on data analytics for taking crucial decisions regarding business strategies and government policies.
Both Data Science ( DS) and Digital Marketing (DM) have evolved and revolutionized in terms of their use and profitability. This has led to the emergence of a digital ecosystem that connects its users 24-7 while also shaping as well as influencing their habits and behaviours.
In simple terms, Data Science is a technique to deal with large quantities of data and extract valuable insights from it. These insights are extracted using scientific algorithms and systems. These data insights can be finely structured and used on various applications, by various departments, business or sectors as necessary and relevant. DS has evolved to be the most powerful tool that helps in understanding audience mindset, needs and wants to build targeted campaigns and marketing for influencing their buying behavior and other key decisions. The Great Hack on Netflix, a documentary film, explores how a data analytics company used over 5,000 data points on American nationals to influence their votes towards a specific candidate. This is where Digital Marketing plugs in to optimize the results of DS.
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Digital marketing refers simply towards all marketing efforts that occur online. DM is a tool used to market a brand’s product or service using digital technologies and social media applications. Brands have the opportunity to leverage search engines, social media applications, emails, and other websites to connect with their current customer base or potential customers. Daily operations of a digital marketing executive include working with:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Making the most or optimizing the search results for a brand from the top tier of search engines.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)/ Programmatic Advertising: Involves working on strategies to sponsor ads in search engines, popular websites which have an audience similar to the brands, buying advertising space for banners and posters and more.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM): Involves strategies of direct interaction with its loyal following on social media applications such as Facebook, Instagram and more. It also involves outreach to new following and potential customers as well as representing a brand’s ethos with creative design and copywriting.
In this context, data science acts as a boon for digital marketers. The key role of data scientists is to work with algorithms, systems and techniques to sort the available data at hand and offer critical information on audience behavior patterns that will help digital marketers to strategize, form or modify their campaigns to target their ads towards specific websites and its audiences. In today’s world of virtual simulation and metaverse, it would be impossible to think of Digital Marketing without Data Science. A data scientist is involved in working at various levels and his/her profile may changes basis sector/ domain or department, however, some of the basic tasks and responsibilities of a data scientist are:
-To build and manage database
-To analyze and understand the data at hand
-To predict future trends and communicate the data to relevant teams for their decision making processes.
The key aspect to understand here is that while DS helps penetrate into the data and find relevant points, it takes human intervention to implement them into profitable strategies for a brand. These strategies are implemented into marketing strategies, including DM. Making Digital Marketing a powerful subset of Data science for achieving desired results.
Given the world came to a halt during the pandemic, brands realized rather quickly in the span of weeks to couple of months on how essential it is to master their data analytics game that will aid them in producing top notch digital marketing strategies that give desired output. Only the brands that were agile and resilient to induce and adopt the change survived and are now working on growth marketing with their data.
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The points below reflect how data science aids digital marketing tools to achieve targets and optimize their potential.
Strategize: Budget Optimization
Marketing involves working with strict budgets and optimization of these limited budgets plays a key role in the success of campaigns. Data analysts build a spending model which will help marketers to utilize the budget more efficiently and effectively. This is done by marketers by working with the data in hand to allocate their budget across streams of different channels and different campaigns to optimize for key metrics.
DS offers you the opportunity to compare the performance of different campaigns on various platforms and give insights into how well your campaign performed for you to make the best decisions further on the budget allocation towards avenues that are offering the maximum ROI.
With DS marketers can allocate their budget effectively to various channels or a limited few that boost their customer acquisition rates. It also helps in identifying issues with your previous campaigns. Marketers are able to fetch information related to market trends, consumer behaviour on each channel and more via DS.
Plan: Efficient planning of campaigns
Brands usually have data present on their website and social media platforms that are visited frequently by their audiences. DS enables you to gather this data in one place, structure it into relevant findings and data points, these data points are analyzed to build more effective campaigns with details as small as what time of posts works best to which location in a said country has the highest level of engagement. In short, giving you the answers to when, where and how your audience interacts with your brand. These aspects aid the marketers to design and execute their campaigns in a more efficient manner as per brand’s customer behaviour, business requirements and needs and lead you towards a higher ROI.
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Build: Enhance customer experience
DS aids us to identify unique customer behaviour and interaction, acting as a backbone to DM, it helps to build tailor-make campaigns and implementation strategies. As a by-product of this, there is a high-quality consumer experience that led to higher engagements and customer need fulfilment.
DS also helps in segmenting customers to match the right campaign with the right customers. Data Scientists create a lifetime value model for this segmentation based on customer behavior patterns. For example, this helps to send discount offers and codes to their repeat customers/ high valued customers, instant purchase tangible discounts and freebies for when customers have visited a product a number of times – a call for action.
This is a hassle-free service the brand builds on for pleasing their customer base and is made easy to use for the marketers by the use of DS tools.
Improve: Campaign Performance
DS offers marketers insights on various channels and application performance thus offering them the opportunity to learn from these data points to tailor the content consumption and optimize performance.
With customer segregation based on demographics, buying habits and geo-location, marketers can plan their campaigns, social media marketing strategies, budget allocation and other aspects in alignment with each customer segment’s needs. This level of segregation helps deliver better results and improve the performance of campaigns. For example, Adidas uses segregated data points to personalize their campaigns for their male and female customers and further segregates customer profiles into casual wear to sports-related purchases.
Understand: Real-time data
Collecting data post each campaign is part of the marketers’ job – this helps them to track the progress and errors of the campaign. While marketers worked with previously collected data for the longest time to predict trends and produce campaigns, Data science has changed the entire paradigm of how digital marketing works in the present day and will work in the future. Focused on real-time data collection powered by powerful emerging technology tools of AI and ML. Prediction analysis is done on the present market situation, trends and consumption pattern of consumers, the effectiveness of execution time for each campaign and more.
Working with fresh data points on each campaign helps marketers build unique design campaigns effectively targeting their loyal customers base.
The quick churn of such unique and impactful data keeps digital marketers on their toes while aiding them to build customer-focused campaigns to stay ahead of their competition and build products on present-day needs to keep the innovation cycle going.
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Develop: New / Better product development
While we have learnt how DS helps to segregate our customers into various profiles and helps us target them to improve campaign performance, DS also performs a cluster analysis of your audience that helps you understand your audience a step further. Is your audience willing to buy from you, from the current stock available and what price points are they willing to buy.
DS also aids in understanding your competitors target audience and what they are interested in. With this information, it offers you a range of price points, likes and preferences in products that allows you to develop new products and widen the customer base.
We can understand from these points how DS is the backbone of digital marketing and helps brands to become more agile and efficient in their planning to execution. Pandemic shifting the world towards rapid growth in digitization, both DS and DM saw unprecedented growth and acceptance. For brands to stay ahead in the game, the application of critical data points earned from DS integrated with DM tools will remain one the key factors for successful business in the near future.
If you are one who is seeking a career in digital marketing or the tech world, you must explore the BMS and MBA in Digital Marketing course from Hetic
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