Improving Marketing Operations Through Data-Driven Decision Making

Data-driven decision-making, or DDDM for short, is the process of collecting data based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and using that data to make informed business decisions. Validating a course of action before committing to it ensures that the company’s roadmap is based on evidence rather than personal likes or dislikes.

Data-driven decision-making, or DDDM for short, is the process of collecting data based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and using that data to make informed business decisions. Validating a course of action before committing to it ensures that the company’s roadmap is based on evidence rather than personal likes or dislikes.

Data-driven decision-making is crucial for any aspect of a modern business strategy, and marketing operations are no different. Data-driven decisions allow the marketing team to optimize their strategies, making them more efficient and effective. Fostering a data-driven culture will ensure the marketing team remains unbiased, goal-oriented, and focused on continually improving their output.

While it might seem simple on the surface, data-driven decision-making is a skill that takes practice. To help you master this skill and use it to drive business growth, we’ve compiled a guide on improving marketing operations through data-driven decision-making. Keep reading to learn more.

?

Identifying the KPIs of Data-Driven Decision Making

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are quantifiable measurements of how well the business is progressing toward a specific goal or objective. Some KPIs measure the overall business performance. However, larger businesses tend to have multiple KPIs for individual departments, including sales, finances, operations, and marketing.

When it comes to?marketing, there are several KPIs that businesses should be tracking to understand how to optimize their campaigns. These include:

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC).?This metric is critical for making budgetary decisions. It indicates how much it costs to convert a potential lead into a customer.
• Return on investment (ROI).?Marketing ROI measures the revenue a business earns against its total marketing cost.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS).?ROAS is a specific metric that can be used to determine the success of a marketing initiative. It measures how many dollars the business has generated per dollar spent on a marketing campaign.
• Marketing qualified lead (MQL)?This metric helps the marketing team determine how many leads they bring in. When nurtured correctly, MQLs convert into sales-qualified leads (SQLs).
• Follower growth.?Tracking the number of followers across various social media channels allows the marketing team to gauge their campaign’s success in increasing brand awareness.
• Social media engagement.?While the number of followers is significant, it’s even more essential to determine what percentage of those followers actually engage with the business’s content online.

?

These and similar KPIs are invaluable analytical tools for the marketing department and data-driven decision-making in general. Without KPIs, the marketing team doesn’t have a starting point they can use for estimates and strategies. For this reason, the importance of tracking marketing KPIs can’t be understated.

Most businesses track these KPIs monthly. However, these metrics fluctuate quickly, so specific marketing campaigns might call for weekly or even daily reporting to ensure they stay on track.

To identify the relevant KPIs for your business, determine where it is now and where you want it to be after a specific period. For example, if you want to gain more followers, choose the follower growth KPI. If, on the other hand, you suspect your business is wasting too much money on unsuitable ads, focus on the ROAS metric.

No matter how many growth measurements you decide to follow, ensure your chosen KPIs are easily quantifiable, relevant, and within your control. Then, assign each KPI to an individual within the marketing team and have them track and report on it regularly and transparently.

?

Collecting and Analyzing Data

Once you’ve established your goal and chosen the KPIs to focus on, set the timeframe for your data collection. Old-school marketers typically prefer to track the targeted metrics manually, in a table or a spreadsheet. Naturally, this task was quite time-consuming. Collecting, extracting, and formatting data by hand would delay the entire data-driven decision-making process.

Nowadays, plenty of business software tools can do most of the work for you. These tools aren’t only meant for?experts. Most business owners can use them to collect and analyze data, as well as extract helpful conclusions from the collected information. Then, they can use these conclusions to inform data-driven decision-making and optimize marketing campaigns.

The best tool for your business will depend on the type of data you want to collect and your overall goal. Some of the most popular tools and platforms for collecting and analyzing data relevant to marketing activities include:

• Google Analytics.?Google Analytics is a free tracking tool that allows businesses to set up data tracking and understand how customers interact with their websites. It is the go-to analytics tool for over?28 million websites
• Google Search Console.?Google Search Console is a free yet powerful tool that reports on a website’s search traffic. It allows marketers to monitor website performance and identify opportunities for optimization.
• Semrush is a marketing research tool that provides insights into several vital aspects of marketing, including SEO, advertising, social media, and content marketing.
• HubSpot is a marketing automation platform with various tools for collecting and analyzing marketing data. It includes features like lead capture forms, social media scheduling, and email marketing. It also offers analytics and reporting capabilities.
• Optimizely is a popular optimization and experimentation platform marketers use to run A/B split tests and optimize and personalize marketing campaigns. Its intuitive interface facilitates data-driven decision-making based on real-time data analytics.

?

A quantitative analysis?of the collected data focuses on numbers and statistics. As such, it focuses on measurable and concrete results.

However, as important as numbers are for marketing, conducting a qualitative analysis is also crucial. Observing rather than measuring data points gives you a more subjective look into your KPIs.

Let’s take an ad for a new product as an example. A quantitative analysis will track how many people saw the ad, who they are, and whether they purchased the product afterward. In contrast, a qualitative analysis will focus on the viewers’ opinions of the ad and the emotions it evokes in them. This information provides valuable insight into how consumers perceive the new product and its ad, which can help inform future marketing strategies.

Whether quantitative or qualitative, analyzing your KPIs is crucial in data-driven decision-making. Without it, the marketing team is left with information that offers little to no help. After an analysis, the marketing team can clearly see whether a campaign is working.

?

Personalizing Marketing Initiatives

After collecting the data and extracting actionable insights, it’s time to use your findings to personalize your business’s marketing initiatives.

Personalized marketing is a strategy that relies on the collected data and gained insights to tailor the marketing campaign’s content, messaging, and offer to individual consumers or target audiences. Personalization is based on the audience’s demographics, interests, behaviors, preferences, and purchase history. It aims to create a more engaging and relevant experience that will increase engagement, improve conversion rates, and strengthen brand loyalty.

Personalizing marketing initiatives can be done through various channels, including social media ads, email marketing, and website content.

For example, Amazon’s algorithm will curate scarily accurate product recommendations based on the customer’s past purchases, just like Spotify will recommend what songs or albums to listen to next.

Similarly, Facebook and Instagram ads can target users based on specific browsing and purchasing behaviors. Did you Google for cat food? You’re likely to be met by social media ads targeted toward feline owners in no time.

Personalization is key to improving marketing operations.?With personalization, your business can deliver a much better customer experience, increase engagement, acquire and retain customers, and enhance data-driven decision-making. Personalizing marketing campaigns will ultimately lead to a better ROI by reducing spending on irrelevant ads and messages.

Data-Driven Decision Making, Marketing?Experimenting, and Testing

If you’ve got the Midas touch, you might strike gold with your initial marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, it’s much more likely that you’ll have to experiment and test different approaches for some time before discovering what works best for your business.

Naturally, the experimentation and testing should still rely on the collected and analyzed data and the success or failure of past marketing campaigns.

Marketing experiments allow you to assess how well a marketing method will perform before implementing it on a large scale. Famously, or perhaps infamously, Netflix announced a?password-sharing crackdown?in smaller markets in Latin America. However, the move was met with widespread outrage online, prompting Netflix to backtrack on its plans.

Hopefully, your marketing experiments will end better, but regardless of the results, they provide invaluable insight into your next moves.

While marketing experiments are meant to discover new marketing methods to bolster your roster, marketing testing serves to confirm already existing theories. Here are examples of some popular testing methodologies to help you understand this notion better:

• A/B testing.?A/B testing allows you to test different versions of marketing messages, ads, or landing pages and determine the more effective one. For instance, you can send emails with different subject lines, one with emojis and the other without, to see which version generates higher open rates.
• Multivariate testing.?Multivariate testing is similar to A/B testing but involves testing multiple variables. A marketer may test multiple call-to-action variations in a social media post to determine the optimal combination for generating the highest click-through rates.
• Content testing.?Content testing aims to discover whether users understand the provided content. Through content testing, marketers can establish whether all users understand the phrasing of a discount offer and if that wording attracts enough attention.

?

Without testing theories,?marketers?can go off based on their personal preferences or experiences with other businesses. However, no two businesses are the same, so testing can help determine what actually works in your case.

Automating Marketing Processes

Marketing automation uses technology to automate repetitive marketing tasks like email marketing, social media posting, and ad campaigns. Automating marketing processes isn’t done solely for the sake of efficiency. Besides streamlining your workflow and reducing manual labor, this process offers several other benefits, including:

• Providing a more personalized and relevant experience to the customers
• Increasing conversion rates
• Providing valuable insights for data-driven decision making
• Boosting customer engagement

Most marketing automation software programs include various features to accomplish these goals, such as analytics, lead management, email marketing, and social media marketing.

Besides these programs, businesses can automate their marketing processes with chatbots and artificial intelligence. According to a?2021 survey?conducted by Deloitte, 77% of chief marketing officers used AI technologies to automate redundant tasks.

Some of the most popular marketing automation software programs include:

• HubSpot is a top-rated all-in-one marketing platform that comes with an impressive list of features.
• EngageBay is excellent marketing automation software for medium-sized businesses. It includes numerous helpful features like social media management, email marketing, and a chatbot.
• Marketo is a cloud-based marketing automation and optimization suite geared toward enterprises. It includes features for email marketing, lead management, social media marketing, and analytics.

?Those focusing only on email marketing can try Mailchimp, while ManyChat is an excellent option for a chatbot service. Choosing the best marketing automation tool depends on your budget, business needs, and goals.

?

Best Practices for Data-Driven Marketing Operations

To facilitate data-driven decision-making, you must start by making your entire business more data-driven. Here are some tips and good practices to help you get started and gradually improve your marketing operations:

• Be mindful of your biases.?A 2010 study?showed that reducing decision-making bias leads to a 7% higher ROI. When it comes to data-driven decision-making, let the numbers speak for themselves instead of focusing on the data you want to see.
• Invest in data quality.?Regularly clean and organize the collected data to ensure its accuracy. This involves erasing outdated and duplicated information and arranging the data by categories.
• Create customer personas.?Use the collected data to develop detailed customer personas that will help you tailor your messaging and content and, in turn, increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
• Use predictive analytics.?Predictive analytics can help you forecast future outcomes and identify areas for improvement. It also identifies which campaigns and channels will most likely generate positive results.
• Invest in marketing automation.?Use marketing automation tools to streamline and automate your marketing processes. This will help you save time, increase efficiency, and generate more leads and conversions.
• Never stop evolving.?Not a single relevant marketing metric is set in stone. In fact, they change quickly, often following current trends. For this reason, it’s crucial to continuously monitor, refine, and optimize your marketing strategies to enable consistent growth in today’s cut-throat digital age.

?

A Recipe for Success

By using data-driven decision-making, you can significantly improve the effectiveness of your marketing operations. Of course, for the data to properly inform your decisions, it has to be harnessed, analyzed, and implemented correctly. That’s where automation tools, marketing testing, and experimentation come into play.

As long as you let the numbers speak for themselves, foster a data-driven culture, and never cease to evolve, you can propel your business to new and exciting heights.