Data-Driven Marketing is widely described as making informed decisions in marketing based on data, and it’s often exemplified by companies using customer and audience data to enhance growth marketing strategies.
Data-Driven Marketing allows the business to:
- Have enough understanding of clients to be able to anticipate their needs
- React to important events in the customer journey faster than competitors
- Personalise customer experience
- Measure and improve all strategies
Without data-driven talent and culture, companies will be left behind in a highly competitive landscape. At the same time, organisations that are embracing data are three times more likely to achieve competitive advantage in customer engagement/loyalty (74% vs. 24%) and almost three times more likely to increase revenues (55% vs. 20%).
Although Marketing Analytics is a single piece of the whole business analytics system, the marketing department can drive an impactful cultural change by showcasing the success of applying Data-Driven strategies.
In this article, we’ll show you how Marketers can leverage Data-Driven Marketing to enhance companies efficiency and effectiveness, generating consistent business growth.
Don’t Underestimate Your Mission
More than ever, marketers are dealing with highly complex processes to increase companies engagement capabilities and profitability. This is highlighted by the fact that, in the past five years, 42% of marketers have installed more than ten individual solutions across marketing, data, analytics or customer engagement technologies.
Marketers handle a high volume of data which flows in from several different channels and various departments, which means that the data is often fragmented and messy with the most diverse structures. They’re commonly referred to as silos. We cover that complexity in more detail in our earlier post on How Big Data Analytics is Transforming Digital Marketing.
A report published by the CMO Council showed that only 6% of marketers believe they can get a complete view of their customer from all available data sources. 43% agree that they do not lack data; instead, they are missing the ability to transform data into real-time action.
The study also showed that one of the roadblocks preventing organisations from implementing Data-Driven strategies is, for 31% of the respondents, the lack of a data foundation upon which a customer data strategy can be built.
Culture Shifts Start with People
A Data-Driven Culture cannot be bought; it must be developed. And as you must know, making culture changes in any organisation is never easy, and the real challenge behind such changes goes beyond implementing data infrastructures.
Thriving Data-Driven Culture requires that companies break down silos, and people collaborate across functions. It exposes people to other tasks and projects and enables the development of skills that may help to fill gaps across different teams.
As Data-Driven Marketing is an enterprise-wide effort that requires data, expertise and innovative thinking from many departments, you can start by tackling misconceptions of the marketing department functions – as it can be viewed as an advertising team instead of having a critical role in driving organisational growth.
Through effective communication, these teams such as marketing, finance and sales should work together and seek to understand each other for data to create positive outcomes for the organisation. In embedding the change and building support, the critical message to communicate is the power of small changes to have a significant impact.
Every Challenge Can Be an Opportunity
To make analytics part of the fabric of daily operations, managers must view it as central to solving problems and identifying opportunities. Even the best data won’t matter if you don’t know what purpose to use it for.
Before starting to collect data, you should know what data is worth collecting. Understand and determine what types of data can have a positive impact on your marketing challenges and focus on gathering data around key KPIs that can really move the needle. After all, how are you ever going to drive your business forward if you don’t know which questions – and their answers – will help you solve actual problems?
Although the most successful data strategies identify business requirements first and then tailor the infrastructure, data sources and analytics to support the business opportunity, many organisations fail on clearly defining and communicating what their core priorities are.
If you want your efforts to drive business growth, you need to leverage your interpretation skills in order to understand what these challenges are, then you can decide on how to tackle them. It will enable you to not only base decisions on reliable data, but it will also allow you to model the data in a way that better represents the challenge you have in real life.
Take Control of Your Data Sources
You may have heard this advice many times, but something that no one tells you is how to get there. Many organisations have a robust data stack composed of massive databases, data pipelines, and advanced data processing systems, but what do you do when your company has no infrastructure?
Start with Your Website
Google Analytics can be the source of truth for web analytics reporting. However, having it installed doesn’t necessarily mean that you are collecting the data correctly.
One way to assess if GA is appropriately tracking your traffic and transactions is to run a Google Analytics audit. In the following article, our Head of Analytics explains how to conduct a Google Analytics audit in under 30 minutes.
Even if you rely on partners to analyse your marketing data, you should peer in the process and evaluate your Google Analytics implementation. You shouldn’t take the risk of making decisions from untrusted data, so by conducting this audit, you can either learn whether your partnerships are empowering you – or if you’re simply relying on outside help to drive a crucial piece of your marketing strategy.
Now we’d like to know: Is there any data challenge that you’re struggling to solve?
IMWT has a team of highly skilled marketing data analysts that can help you mature your data capabilities. Want to know more? Get a free consultation.
