Posted: March 2, 2020
As digital marketing continues to take a bigger piece of the overall marketing pie, the importance of data-driven marketing gets bigger as well. Harnessing marketing data to drive your digital marketing strategy is one of the big overall trends as we move into the future. After all, marketing and advertising are more than just guesses and assumptions of who your customers are and what they want!
But what does “harnessing marketing data” actually mean for today’s digital marketers? 64% of marketing executives “strongly agree “ that data-driven marketing is crucial. It may sound intuitive to “use data” to come to conclusions, but many companies struggle to translate customer and marketing data into an actionable strategy.
Before going any further, we should mention that these insights make sense for digital marketers who already are collecting data but may not be using it to its fullest potential. If you aren’t currently collecting data on your leads or customers, you’ll want to start there. Working with a CRM database can be a great place to start. Now, back to talking about marketing data!
Although we can’t make a blanket statement about what your digital marketing strategy should be, Four Tens can provide a few pointers on how you can look at your data as a road map instead of as a confusing mess of numbers in a spreadsheet.
Get the Basics Down: Many companies and businesses are already collecting more data than they know or have reviewed. But if you’re in the beginning stages of compiling and analyzing your data, you’ll need to start by knowing what data you have currently to work with. Gather all sources of data and start generating reports. Determine what time frame you want to work with (last 12 months, 3 months, 4 weeks) and use that as your baseline to start. Once you’ve selected data parameters and collected all the data in one place, then you start to analyze the reports and look for trends.
Make the Data Visible: Some people can easily distinguish trends by looking at numbers in a spreadsheet. For the rest of us, visual aids in the form of charts, graphics, and dashboard views can help tremendously. It is likely that your CRM has a dashboard or report function so take advantage of that. If not, exporting data to a spreadsheet application should give you the ability to convert the data into a graph. If not, you may also want to consider upgrading your CRM or switching entirely to one with more reporting capabilities.
Marketing isn’t just the Marketing Department: Marketing and Sales should be working closer together than ever before. Segmenting customer data by department only makes each department’s job harder to accomplish. Centralizing customer data is the key to viewing the entire customer journey and viewing all the data to make fully informed, data-driven decisions. Work with decision-makers to open up the data that both Sales and Marketing use so that Sales can gain insights about the customer journey as they make their decision and Marketing can see repeat customer behaviors.
Read Between the Lines: You may look to your data to support a hunch or gut instinct that you have, but in looking at the data with a result already in mind, you may be missing valuable insights. Looking for all patterns and insights that your data showcases may illuminate new business opportunities, if you’re open to it. This open-mindedness will maximize the value of your data and put you one step closer to making the most informed marketing decisions possible. As you do your reporting, don’t just read the data you see, but also what the data isn’t showing. Then you’ll be able to see the big picture for your data.
Focus on What Matters: It can be easy to think that the relationship between the amount of data you have and how informed you can be as a marketer is qualitative. It’s not. At a certain point (that’s different for every business), you’ll reach more data than you need or can use effectively. Therefore, it’s key to define the metrics and data that are the most necessary for you to use when charting your digital marketing strategy. Then you can focus on the driving factors and analyze that data without being overburdened by reports.
Always Be Learning: Even if another member of your digital marketing team is the “reporting guru”, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t know the jargon and location for attribution numbers, testing initiative benchmarks, etc. As the world of digital marketing expands, and becomes more data-centric, all digital marketers will need to have a solid foundation in reading and understanding digital marketing data. The whole purpose of digital marketing data is to create actionable insights. If you don’t know how to interpret your data, work with someone who can show you how. This will improve your data skills and your digital marketing skills.
These tips should not only guide you on interpreting the data you have, but also filtering through the information that you need versus what your Sales team may think is most important. You may also find holes in the information that you are looking for. These are great opportunities to investigate your data-collection processes and tweak as necessary. And remember, digital marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time to develop the ecosystem that best supports your brand or company, and as products, services, and customer wants and needs are always changing, you’ll never get it down perfectly. You should always be reviewing, investigating, and adapting.
Not sure where to even start when it comes to data-driven digital marketing strategies? Luckily, that’s something Four Tens is keen on getting right. Send us a message and we’ll chat about your current set up and what’s missing to get you where you need to go.