Data-driven marketing has come to the forefront for companies that want to better engage their customers and prospects. With data-driven marketing, firms are able to gather, integrate, and assess data from a variety of internal and external sources to help enhance value.

Marketing automation starts with data. In fact, in the digital age, almost all marketing initiatives start with data. Companies who are data-driven have a distinct advantage over their competitors. When a company is data-driven, they focus on their strengths, enhance their weaknesses and they don't obsess over their competition. They have the data to understand how they can improve.

1. Determine what really makes customers tick. According to the DMA, data-driven marketing is about discerning what customers want and need and engineering the company to provide it: “The more firms can use data to develop a 360-degree, multi-channel view of what customers think and want, the more the customer will truly be king.” Through the use of both internal and external data, companies are learning how to “crown” their customers — truly understand what makes them tick, and then develop campaigns that engage them in the most effective manner possible.

This all comes with data analytics. Understanding what drives your customers behaviors is step one to developing campaigns and offers. Without an understanding of what your customers want, there is not an efficient way to determine what they would like from you.

2. Set baselines for campaign effectiveness. Data-driven marketing has effectively replaced the traditional “hit-or-miss” test component of the typical direct marketing campaign.

Baselines are a very important piece to understand when analyzing campaigns. This is the beginning of the journey to understand the effectiveness of any changes that are made. If an organization cannot answer what a particular program is bringing them, they should test the campaigns without the program and determine what, if any, the effectiveness of the program is bringing.

3. Block out the “noise” and focus on what’s relevant. When assessing data over multi-year periods — and across different marketing channels — it’s not unusual for things to be extremely “busy” at the outset. There’s a lot of static and responses are all over the place. However, by using proven data-driven marketing techniques, you can start to pull out the relevant information, analyze it over time, pick up on traffic patterns, and drill down to specific marketing touch points (i.e., number of website hits that come in when a specific direct-response show airs).

This is a lot harder than it sounds. Marketers are the kings of taking a piece of data and selling their story with it, even though it is just noise or a small sample of customers. This is where the "art and science" approach is necessary. Being able to combine data mining techniques with the business acumen is key to focusing on the relevance of the data.

4. Determine exactly how customers are responding.

Again, this is important to understand multi-channel marketing. The ability to reach your customers on the right channel at the right time is only possible through data.

5. Reach extremely targeted customer bases.

The promise of 1-to-1 marketing is arriving. Be careful to shoot for this level of personalization, because it is very expensive and the pearl is not worth the dive for the majority of your database. However, being able to target your best customers in a very personal nature could help grow the business exponentially. This takes extreme focus.

Focus: What you want to offer to the target customer and what you don’t; Difference: Why your value proposition is divergent from competitive alternatives.

I don't know about 15 words, but succinct and to the point is the best way to articulate a strategy. So much time is built constructing long strategy documents that sit on a shelf and are never read again. A mantra or a short strategic statement become rallying cries of the organization.

I had the pleasure of watching a keynote by Guy Kawasaki where he stated that every organization needed a mantra. It is something that has changed my way of thinking since hearing the logic behind his statements. It takes so much inertia to move an organization that having a simple mantra can rally the entire organization around a single statement.

The focus and difference in the strategy statement proposed by Alessandro Di Fiore are wonderful points. So many times the target customer is forgotten in an organization. In an age of growing earnings every quarter and constant pressure on short-term financial results, the target customer gets lost in the shuffle, replaced by revenue opportunities that alienate the target. The difference piece is key for the organization to understand what they need to deliver to that target customer. Once the organization understands why it's different, it becomes easier for everyone to deliver on the promise.