by Nicola Hodd 
In our last blog post, we looked at Why Data-Driven Marketing Is the Only Way Forward to measure and improve your campaign effectiveness. However, it’s one thing to ensure that all of your activities are being tracked and another to start learning from this insight and taking immediate action.
Here are our top tips to help you start acting on your data and improving your marketing campaigns today:
Set the right objectives and KPIs
Consider what you’re trying to achieve with this campaign. Is it registrations to an event? Newsletter sign-ups? Increasing traffic to your site? Generating leads? These will be your overall objectives for the campaign. Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will tell you how you’re going to reach those overall goals. How many registrations do you need? What’s your expected conversion rate? How many visitors do you need to attract to your landing page?
Having clear goals at the start will help you to identify the metrics that really matter to the campaign rather than getting tied up in reporting that doesn’t help you measure or improve the effectiveness of the campaign.
Understanding your data
Data is integral to your campaign performance – both in the way that you collect and analyse data, use it in personalisation and report on it. Pardot forms can help you to keep your data clean, consistent and complete whilst building a richer profile of your prospects.
Tracking your prospects across their whole buyer journey using Pardot can also help you to infer certain information about them whilst completion actions or automation rules can help you add data to their profile and send more targeted or personalised communications.
Understanding where your data has come from, what it means and how it can be used to send more targeted and relevant communications is key to your campaign effectiveness.
Think about the metrics that really matter
We’ve already talked about overall goal setting being able to help you to identify the right success metrics. Think about the stats that are going to measure the right engagement you’re looking for, the level of conversions you need and ultimately the revenue you’re generating.
Take a holistic approach to your reporting, ensuring you monitor success beyond your campaign. A great example I heard of recently was the addition of a phone number field to a customer’s form. It reduced conversion rate of the form dramatically, but after further investigation it was discovered that the additional phone number data helped the sales reps to get through to the contact faster and was more likely to convert to won business.
By carefully considering which metrics will truly measure the success of your campaign, you’ll be able to use data more efficiently and effectively.
Continuous improvement
Once you’ve identified the right metrics, put the required tracking in place and started to run your campaigns, you’ll need to let it run to see the data build up. Use the information to adjust your campaigns, whether it’s small tweaks or an entire rethink of your communication strategy.
Over time, you will undoubtedly learn something new and be able to refine the process. If something is working well do more of the same and, if not, look to adapt it.
Communicating to stakeholders
It’s becoming more and more important for marketers to prove that their marketing budget, time and resources are being spent in the most efficient and productive way. You’ll be confident at this point that you’re measuring the right metrics and adapting your campaigns accordingly but how do you communicate this great work across the business?
When communicating with other stakeholders such as sales, operations, finance, IT teams or senior management, consider what data matters to them in their day-to-day lives. What are their objectives and how are your campaigns helping to achieve them? Or if you’re pitching for more time or resources, what overall impact will this have for the business?
Keep it simple using relevant information to their roles and present the data in a way that’s going to keep them engaged, interested and understand your point clearly.
Don’t get analysis paralysis
Although data-driven marketing is key to campaign success, don’t get too bogged down in the detail and report on metrics for the sake of reporting. It wastes time that you could spend formulating and creating great marketing campaigns in the first place.
Start small, get your campaigns live and start to learn from it for future campaigns. If you find that you need additional metrics in order to measure success then you can add in extra tracking and reporting later.