Data marketing is becoming increasingly popular, and marketers are increasingly data specialists. An easy first lesson for beginners is understanding the difference between hard and soft data.
Hard data refers to factual information, such as someone's name, address, or gender. It is explicitly provided by visitors, for example, when someone fills in their personal details on a web form. Hard data is valuable because it provides concrete, reliable information about your audience and can be directly used to improve targeting, personalization, and customer insights.
Soft data, on the other hand, is more fluid. It provides insights into a person’s preferences and interests. For example, is a customer price-conscious, or do they value quality and service more? Which products or topics are they interested in? Soft data is mostly determined implicitly, derived from assumptions based on visitor behavior.
Marketers often focus on hard data, and this is understandable.
Firstly, hard data is easier to collect. Soft data emerges implicitly from someone's online behavior and is therefore harder to ascertain. Extracting soft data from 'raw' behavioral data requires more analytics skills.
Secondly, soft data is more changeable than hard data. A young father might want to book a romantic city trip with his wife one moment and a family vacation the next. This makes it harder to respond to soft data than to hard data.
Thirdly, with soft data, you never know for sure if it's accurate because it's based on assumptions. Even if you ask someone directly, it may still not be entirely accurate. For example, someone may say they value service but then only search for the cheapest hotels on the site. As a marketer, you prefer to rely on certainties.
My recommendation is to use soft data alongside hard data, not as a replacement. The true value lies in combining the two, creating the richest insights into your visitors. This enables marketers to communicate in a more targeted and effective way, optimizing campaigns and user engagement.
Then read the ANWB case study. They combined hard data, such as customer status, with soft data, like visitor interests in different countries, and achieved remarkable conversion rates.