Data availability now makes it possible for companies across industries to fully take advantage of it. This also applies to marketing data. Digital marketers use many different tools, launch campaigns, test hypotheses, and analyze metrics, so they operate with tons of data.
However, there is another side: proper data processing and obtaining insights from it. According to the Data Camp literacy report, 41% of respondents across the US and the UK consider inadequate data skills the number one risk for business. For marketers, it may lead to inaccurate decision-making on strategic and daily levels.
In this guide, you will learn the benefits of data in marketing and how to use it in your digital marketing strategies.
Marketing data explained
Marketing data are data points that professionals need to improve campaigns’ performance and make decisions. They include KPIs, inputs from customers, results of marketing activities, insights from other departments, and many more. You can find this data in surveys, internal databases, customer feedback, market research, or external reliable sources.
To transform these data points into a usable format, marketers use automation and analytics tools and apply analysis approaches. These processes allow professionals to optimize their marketing strategies and become data-driven.
This infographic is based on the research by Coupler.io and provides a quick overview of data-driven marketing:
Let’s move on and explore other essential concepts of the data-driven marketing approach.
Types of data in marketing
You may wonder what types of marketing data you should track and analyze. Here are the most recommended:
- Customer data
- Campaign data
- Competitors and market data
The first category, customer data, comprises demographic information, psychographic data related to lifestyle and personality traits, as well as behavioral and transactional indicators about customers. Particularly, it’s age, gender, location, purchasing habits, common pain points, interactions with your product/service, etc. It also may include data from lead scoring and generation activities.
Campaign data are metrics to measure, evaluate, and optimize your marketing campaigns. Among dozens of specific metrics per marketing channel, there are common ones like engagement rates, conversions, customer acquisition costs (CAC), return on investment (ROI), click-through rates (CTR), and others. From SEO to digital PR, each channel has its own key metrics, analyzing and combining which can give marketing leads a sufficient overview of the company’s state of marketing.
Market and competitor data is crucial to understanding your product or service’s place in the market. Keeping an eye on competitors and market trends is also a way to make strategic moves in marketing activities. You can get such insights by monitoring market dynamics, global and social trends, news, product releases, competitors’ products, their pricing, digital marketing strategies, and market share. Being aware of what’s happening in your industry and globally is a must.
Key data sources in digital marketing
We discussed data types above, but that data can be stored in different places. While numerous ways to retrieve data exist, there are only two main sources of marketing data:
- internal (from within a company)
- external (external datasets, public records, data from third-party providers)
It is paramount to use both internal and external data sources to make well-informed decisions. Here are some key data sources.
Internal sources:
- CRM systems: contact information, lead tracking, other sales records
- Billing systems: transactions, purchase history, revenue, subscriptions, discounts, etc
- Website and blog: traffic sources, user behavior, sign-ups, content performance, and more
- Advertising platforms: clicks, conversions, A/B testing information, and many other KPIs.
- Calling systems: call center features include call recordings, summaries, customer interaction patterns, and follow-up actions
- Email marketing software: campaigns’ performance, subscribers, open rates, and other metrics
- Social media accounts: a lot of engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, etc)
- Employee timesheets: can provide useful insights into marketing team productivity, time spent on campaigns, and other
In a nutshell, you can consider any helpful information about product and marketing activities to which you have access as internal sources.
External sources:
- Reports on industry trends
- Information available on the web
- Public records and government data
- Third-party databases
- Data from competitors (SEO analysis tools, social media listening and monitoring software, media monitoring)
So, external sources can provide you with public information about your service, competitors, and market.
To implement a valid usage after the data sourcing process, you must ensure several principles are on point.
Principles of marketing data use
Begin your data analytics by clearly defining the goal or problem you need to address. Further data use involves several steps. Based on my experience, I usually use three key approaches when working with data in marketing.
Collect
The first step is to collect all the required information from internal and external sources. It can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Besides, getting data is only half of the job. Since the modern business environment is very dynamic, you also need to keep your data updated, ideally having it in real-time.
During this step, cleaning and preparing the data by removing duplicates, fixing missing values, and ensuring consistently strong data quality is also unskippable.
Automation helps here greatly. With scheduled data integrations, data management platforms, automated flows, and notifications, you can ensure that data collection is done effortlessly and errorlessly. You’ll have fresh and preliminary processed data and be ready to move on.
Organize
Categorize your marketing data into meaningful segments by channels, metrics, user groups, or other indicators. Mainly, I prefer to use spreadsheets. Suppose you have large volumes of data to organize, then use databases and data warehouses. Also, integrate data from various sources for a comprehensive view of your marketing activities.
When your data is clean and streamlined, you already can see the structure and gain first insights. But for getting the most out of it, there’s the third step in this process.
Visualize
This stage is about tools usage to visualize your data and improve data analysis. You can create dashboards with BI tools or reports in spreadsheets to display the data in a usable format. The goal is to get detailed reports to communicate findings and support marketing decision-making.
I mostly use live dashboards in Looker Studio, especially for cross-channel marketing analytics. Displaying data in dashboards offers marketers access to all critical information in one place and the ability to provide greater context for decisions.
Our research also confirms that 71% of marketers enjoy using marketing dashboards. However, many use separate dashboards for each channel or check data directly in various tools.
In brief, gathering, streamlining, and visualizing your data is beneficial for analysis and, respectively, for marketing decision-making.
7 ways to empower your decision-making with marketing data
Businesses have to use marketing data to impact their digital marketing strategies. Let’s overview how exactly data can help your marketing efforts become and stay efficient.
Apply marketing analytics
Without analysis, your data is just raw records. You need to turn it into meaningful information. For instance, streaming platforms use sophisticated marketing analytics to analyze viewing habits and preferences, informing content creation and personalized recommendations.
Start working with your data. Analyze your marketing activities thoroughly: monitor each channel and get a multi-channel picture.
Use analytics and reporting software to track and measure performance, even without advanced expertise. Create live dashboards to get the value of your data in real-time. Look for trends, correlations, and anomalies in your data to uncover opportunities or identify concerns.
With analytics, your data is effectively used, so you can make the right decisions on the way to shaping a sustainable digital marketing strategy that yields practical results.
Optimize marketing campaigns
The data from various sources can help you optimize your campaigns and experiment more. Many huge companies like Airbnb use customer behavior and other data sets to A/B test, tailor messaging, reach new audiences, etc.
Your marketing team can also do the same. Reviewing the performance of your previous campaigns, you can polish those underperforming activities and focus more on successful ones. It’s applicable to all types of marketing and sales activities, from paid advertising to shaping a lead nurturing strategy.
Allocate marketing budgets and resources
By using your data properly, you can gain insights into operational aspects such as budget, resources, and team productivity.
In particular, you can identify high-performing channels with the highest ROI and allocate more resources there. Meanwhile, deprioritize those underperforming ones.
Project data can help you better plan, remove bottlenecks, and estimate marketing team capacity. Team performance analysis will show you the skill set of your team as well as highlight hiring or development needs. You should also check on productivity patterns, peak times, and usage of tools by the team.
Monitoring these data points can help you make quick decisions and optimize budgeting, leading to cost savings.
Personalize customer experience
Every interaction a sales prospect or existing customer has with your brand can be logged and measured.
So, marketers gain a lot of informative data, helping to personalize and improve customer experience. One example is Amazon or similar platforms. They leverage customer data to provide personalized product recommendations and tailored homepage experiences.
Here are some benefits of marketing data for customer experience personalization:
- tailored messaging
- detailed user segmentation
- customer journey improvements
- precise ad targeting
- personalized customer support
- customer retention improvements
Proper data use can have even more implications for customer experience. In brief, it can help you make effective decisions to engage and retain customers and create a personalized approach to every user segment.
Use a competitive advantage
Understanding your marketing performance and monitoring your competitors can give you a competitive advantage.
Competitor data will show you how they approach marketing, what works for them, what channels they don’t use, and in which channels they invest more. While analyzing your own data, you’ll also realize what you do better or should try.
Say, your traffic and rankings are high, but your competitors develop social media more and don’t invest in SEO. It’s a good case to investigate more and understand how you can develop social media marketing.
Another example: you can monitor competitors’ pricing and messaging. With a product team, you can polish your pricing strategy and communicate it as an advantage over other products.
So, both internal and external marketing data can help you differentiate in the market and stay competitive.
Try data-driven experiments
Data opens a wide space for marketing experiments. You already know that analyzing the results and monitoring metrics of your previous campaigns makes it easier for you to optimize further ones. However, it also helps to test hypotheses, including A/B tests, or start new activities.
Namely, knowing what worked in the past allows you to choose different versions of ads, CTA buttons, focus on particular types of content, engage with specific audiences, or even implement new channels. Monitoring your competitors and market will also give you hints on what campaign or activity to try next.
For strategic decisions and inceptions, you can apply approaches like cost-benefit analysis, SWOT analysis, or decision trees to evaluate potential outcomes and risks. We often use BRIDGeS, a decision-making framework. For instance, we had a content distribution session where we identified problems, risks, solutions, and potential benefits using this framework. Also, we prioritized existing activities and got ideas to experiment with, e.g., to distribute our dashboard templates on UGC platforms.
Create an agile digital marketing strategy
What brought results last month might not be that effective soon. Digital marketing requires flexibility. From the above, marketing data helps optimize channels and activities. Combine it all together, and you’ll be able to make your digital marketing strategy agile.
Process real-time marketing data to stay dynamic and responsive. Implement, refine, and polish marketing ideas. Review your strategy regularly to make it adaptive and up-to-date.
Taking an agile approach also means deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and iterating rapidly. At scale, an agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously with multiple ideas regularly.
Key marketing data challenges and how to fix them
On your way to leverage data in marketing decision-making, you can face these common challenges:
Marketing data overload
Due to the massive amount of data marketers use, marketers may miss important points and focus on secondary information.
Data might be stored in different systems or combined data from several sources. More data also means higher data processing and storage costs.
To address this issue, you need to understand what data points are crucial to analyze and where to find them. Further, you need to review your data on schedule and find reliable tools able to process your data in one place. One such option is to use multi-channel live dashboards. They can unite data from different sources. Many solutions allow customization and auto-updating options, so you can have fresh data at hand.
Time-consuming data processing
Handling data flows requires good analytical skills and time, which many companies don’t have.
One way to cope with this is to opt for a dedicated consulting service. Another one is to befriend automation and marketing analytics software.
By automating recurring processes, streamlining marketing reporting, and using pre-built report templates, you can save time and money working with data in marketing.
Marketing attribution issues
Digital marketing attribution remains an issue for many marketers. It’s often difficult to tell which touchpoint brought conversion while marketing attribution software is usually expensive.
To overcome this, you need to choose the right marketing attribution model, you can start with the simplest one and then adopt a hybrid approach. Hybrid models can count the specifics of each business and be more precise. Also, combining data from multiple sources provides a more holistic view of the customer journey, while regular review and adjustment of attribution models can help you stay agile.
Recap: Data-driven decision-making in marketing
Data in marketing enables businesses to make informed decisions on a tactical and strategic level, eventually improving performance, impacting a strategy, and motivating experimentation and flexibility.
However, data processing and analytics require choosing the right data sources and following the principles of gathering, managing, and visualizing records. Apart from that, marketers need to deal with marketing data challenges by automating processes and using analytics software.
If treated right, data remains a crucial source of information for professionals to improve existing campaigns, refine overall strategy, gain competitive advantage, and more.
I hope this guide will help you to get started with data-driven marketing. If you’ve done it already, share your approaches and contribute to the global marketing community.
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