How to Use Marketing Data to Differentiate Yourself & Beat Competitors

We don’t need to tell you the importance of differentiating your brand from competitors on ecommerce. More competitors are entering the marketplace each day—Amazon is home to 2.3 million active sellers and Walmart boasted a 97% digital sales growth in Q2 of 2020. If brands aren’t actively focusing on differentiating themselves, they’ll quickly drown in the sea of competitors that are.

The key to differentiating yourself is simple: Data. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy to implement. It’s challenging to access the data that tells you how to set yourself apart. It’s even more challenging to analyze that data. And mastering the plethora of marketing tools and channels that help you adjust your strategy based on the data you’ve analyzed?

That’s nearly impossible for brands to do on their own because of the myriad marketplaces, platforms, and softwares they use to manage it all. Let’s talk about why data is crucial in setting yourself apart in ecommerce and how you can leverage its power to overcome the most common challenges ecommerce marketers face when trying to differentiate themselves from competitors.

Why data is the single most important factor in differentiating your brand

At Pattern, we’re data fanatics—and for a good reason. For brands selling on ecommerce, data-driven strategy is the key distinguishing factor between mediocre performance and phenomenal success. Brands that use data make more money and experience significantly more growth and opportunities. It’s as simple as that. Here’s a few things data can help you do:

• Data helps you understand your customers, where they’re buying from, their age group, their interests, and countless other details that help you deliver the experience that’s going to keep them coming back for more.
• Data helps you understand your campaigns, how they’re performing, and how you can optimize those campaigns to reach your target audience and spend your dollars more effectively.
• Data helps you understand conversion and retention, helping you maximize your ad dollars, convert at a higher rate, and improve your customer satisfaction.

When you use data to its full potential, your business is more efficient and effective. You spend less and get more, paying less in advertising and awareness per sale. You may be tempted to think that you can’t afford to incorporate data into your strategy, but the reality is that you can’t afford not to. Data gives you vision, perspective, opportunity, efficiency, and scalability—factors that together lead to more sales, stickier sales, better retention, cross-selling, and, at the end of the day, better margins.

How to overcome the common challenges of incorporating data into your marketing strategy

The first challenge marketers face with data is accessing it in the first place, especially considering that Amazon notoriously keeps data close to its chest. You may know how your brand and products fare on Amazon, but little about marketplace trends as a whole. This is where it can be helpful to work with a partner.

Pattern is the 5th largest seller on Amazon, and the sheer quantity of products we sell gives us valuable insights for our partners to apply. We also rely on Predict, our all-in-one ecommerce tracking tool that pulls live data from over 4,000 ecommerce sites each day. Predict helps brands make data-backed decisions when it comes to product listings, advertising, SEO optimization, keyword selection, and much more.

It can also be difficult to know how to interpret and apply data once you’ve accessed it. Even the best marketers can’t possibly know all of the marketing tools and platforms, much less be proficient in them. Processing and analyzing the near-limitless data and information isn’t just a full-time job—it’s a full-time job for a team. This is where Pattern comes in. And the best part? Our team of specialists, who are experts in marketing tools, don’t cost you a dime when you partner with us for free.

Integrating data tells the whole story

Amazon data is certainly insightful, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Data wields the most power when it’s integrated from across different platforms and channels, including marketplaces, search engines, and social media. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Facebook Business Manager are all powerful tools that are too frequently ignored.

Using these tools along with the data from Amazon gives you a more complete picture of how your brand is performing and what messages resonate with your customers. In practice, what does it look like to integrate data? A brand might see, for example, Amazon search trends mirrored on other platforms, like Google, and know that the challenge they’re facing is universal, not platform-specific. They can then set goals to tackle that challenge from all angles.

Another brand may notice that a specific ad is overperforming on Facebook, and they can then take that ad’s messaging and imagery and implement it in their Amazon product listing. Pattern has seen amazing results in implementing these strategies.

Building your brand with data

Building your brand is an oft-overlooked aspect of differentiating your product from competitors. Brands often make the mistake of only focusing on bottom-of-the-funnel marketing, which leads to conversion, while largely forgetting about top-of-the-funnel marketing, which leads to awareness. Even though conversion is the quickest and easiest result to see, building awareness is just as important.

People don’t just buy products anymore—they buy experiences. They want to buy these experiences from brands that they trust, and trust is preceded by familiarity. Brand building drives sales because, without it, people aren’t aware of a brand, much less trusting of it. When people trust a brand, they’re more likely to search for it organically and recommend it to their friends.

Like with all ecommerce marketing decisions, how to build your brand can and should be driven by data. Data can tell you about brand awareness and help you identify the awareness gaps your marketing strategies should be aiming to fill. Like we’ve mentioned before, data can also help you understand your customers and know how to effectively market your product to them.

When you’re building your brand, focus on what your consumers value about your brand and your product. One way we use data in this process is by creating word clouds out of product reviews and taking note of the most commonly praised features. Advertise these features front-and-center in your ads and product description pages.

At Pattern, we’re professionals at addressing the top of the funnel. Our experienced writers, advertisers, and creative team see the bigger picture and know how to manage every aspect of advertising across the funnel. We focus on long-term success, not quick wins, and prioritize sustainability and growth. We want our partners to thrive and grow for years to come, which wouldn’t be possible without advertising to customers at every step in their journey.

What now?

Data is the beginning, middle, and end of a successful ecommerce strategy. If you’re not making marketing decisions based on data, your brand is likely performing below its potential. But the good news is that it’s never too late to incorporate more data-driven decisions into your strategy and start reaping the rewards. Are you ready to differentiate your brand from competitors by leveraging the power of data?

That’s Pattern’s specialty, and we’re here to help.