by Sarah Kelleher 
With more accountability and tighter marketing budgets than ever before, data-driven marketing is critical for modern marketers to succeed. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, to make best use of resource. Your audience, your content, your budget and your time are all valuable assets that need to be used efficiently. Secondly, to prove the value and effectiveness of marketing activities across the business.
Efficiency
I have yet to meet a marketer with free time on their hands. Marketing is a fast-paced, ever-changing function and marketers need to constantly look ahead and evolve to keep pace with the industry. Data can help you use each element in your valuable marketing arsenal to best effect.
- Audience – Analyse your campaigns to track engagement trends in different segments of your audience. Do certain groups respond better to certain types of content or different topics? Use this to target the right people with the right content at the right time.
- Content – It may be king, but content is time-consuming and expensive to put together. Make sure you are using every piece of content you generate to its full potential. Monitor your top-performing content and promote that on additional channels to reach a wider audience.
- Budget – Marketing budget is precious and hard-earned. So, analysing which channels are performing best will help you to allocate that budget more efficiently and get more bang for your buck. This can also help you secure additional investment for high-performers.
- Time – Time is arguably your most valuable resource. There never seems to be enough of it and prioritising your marketing activities can be tough. Analysing the return on your activities allows you to better focus your time and effort and deliver campaigns with the greatest potential ROI.
Effectiveness
More and more, marketers are directly accountable for revenue generation. In both B2C and B2B businesses, lead generation and qualification is a key focus. To secure more budget and resource, marketers need to be able to prove their worth. Data can help you to do just that.
- Track everything – and I mean everything. Whether you use voucher codes, tracked URLs, conversion pixels or a good ol ‘How did you hear about us?’. Tracking your marketing activity is critical in being able to identify all your marketing-influenced revenue.
- Attribute your revenue – With all your marketing campaigns nicely tracked, you can work out which campaigns have contributed to a sale. Whether you use the last touchpoint, the first touchpoint or a multi-touch approach, ensure you have a consistent model for attributing revenue back to your campaigns.
- Share your results – It’s really important to share your contributions and get feedback from other teams, whether that’s sales, customer support, product teams or the board. Marketing are representing the business in the outside world, so it’s vital that they are in sync with the whole company and that every team understands the role and importance of marketing.
However, with so much data out there it’s important to focus on the helpful analytics. Don’t get bogged down in hours and hours of spreadsheets that produce meaningless results. A good rule of thumb is to only ever run reports that will inform your future strategy. Look at the numbers that will help you decide where to allocate your resources, whether to use a certain supplier again or whether to make new hires.
In conclusion, data is everywhere and it can, and should, be used to every marketer’s advantage. Read our next blog post 6 Top Tips to Start Acting on Your Data to start gaining insight on your data today. Or for help from our Pardot experts, get in touch.