Using data and technology to optimize your marketing strategy

In today’s economic climate, the ability to meet changing consumer demands, stay ahead of the competition, and drive sustained growth requires highly personalized and effective marketing strategies that truly target the right people at the right time. How are those strategies achieved? With the help of data. The high-growth big data market is expected to reach $297 billion by 2030, says a Market Research Future report.

So what does the rise of data and the need for individualized, high-performance marketing mean for businesses right now?

“Marketers are under increased pressure to demonstrate and substantiate value by obtaining more data and insights to ensure they’re effectively reaching consumers,” says Garry Capers, Division President, Data Solutions, at Deluxe.

For marketers, there is a lot of value in having an expansive collection of data to work with, but how those data assets are used is equally important, explains Capers. Because there are billions of data points available and separating the signal from the noise can be challenging for businesses, Deluxe provides expert guidance to help its partners reconcile, analyze, and activate the highest quality data.

“To really understand where consumers are in their purchase journeys, relevant data must be responsibly collected from many different sources, woven into a unified fabric, and then analyzed with the right tools—and that’s exactly what Deluxe does,” says Kristopher Lazzaretti, head of Deluxe Data-Driven Marketing. “We pull together billions of insights from hundreds of high-quality data sources and make them available to marketers who want to have a relevant, personalized conversation with their target audiences—and much of our data, including trigger marketing data, is available in near real-time.”

Trigger marketing—reaching a consumer right before, during, or after a key life event—can make a tangible difference when it comes to marketing success, according to Capers and Lazzaretti. Across industries, consumers who make a major financial or purchase decision will often do so after they’ve experienced a trigger event. Deluxe is building one of the industry’s largest life event data repositories and implementing rapid deployment technologies to help its partners quickly reach audiences in the moment.

“The keys to trigger marketing success are coverage and speed—how many consumers can you identify that are having life events and how quickly can you reach them,” Lazzaretti says.

The backbone of these cutting-edge, data-driven marketing solutions is Deluxe’s cloud-based infrastructure, workflow automation tools, and audience decision engines. While implementing these technologies, Deluxe ensures responsible and ethical data collection and consumer privacy, explains Capers.

“Reliable, accurate, ethical data are responsibly sourced, unobtrusive, and easy for consumers to opt in or out of,” says Capers. “At Deluxe, we’re careful stewards of all data assets.”

For businesses who might not think they have the level of data expertise to achieve sophisticated, data-driven marketing strategies, Lazzaretti explains that marketers don’t need to be data experts. They just need an open, innovative mindset.

“The only requirements are a curiosity for performance marketing and an openness to finding a partner, such as Deluxe, that can accelerate the journey up the learning curve,” Lazzaretti says. “Marketers don’t have to go it alone.”

This curiosity and openness can pay off with some significant business results.

“We’re seeing innovative financial services, retail, e-commerce, and telco clients use marketing data to engage consumers and businesses at the time of greatest need and relevance,” Lazzaretti says. “What could be a more compelling case for data-driven marketing than that?”

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com