There are many that claim to be data-driven marketers. When asked, the typical response is that marketing performance metrics are applied to create content, boost SEO, improve quality scores, reduce PPC, or improve some other common marketing measure.
These claims are valid and tell the story of a brand’s interaction with its prospects, customers and advocates. Our experience with large, multi-national brands has shown that the content creators aim to optimize customer-level metrics. This sounds like a good idea; however, how do they know that their efforts are aligning to departmental or even enterprise objectives?
To make this simple let’s use three levels of metrics: customer, department and organization. Content creators focus on the customer level metrics. The purpose of their content is provided by channel leaders, like social media or email, department leaders, like marketing managers or even CMOs. The message is ‘here’s our brand, now attract, convert and retain customers’. Content creators are part artists and part scientists, using data to write creative content that is engaging to humans.
Content creators can become very good at what they do and optimize performance metrics for their channel. In turn, the marketing leaders take that information to show that their efforts either beat competitor engagement rates, have lowered PPC, have a higher search rank or beat industry average email open rates. All of these metrics are shown to prove marketing’s worth.
At the top, c-suite executives may see growth and retention, but what do they do if they don’t? The marketing metrics are positive. Where does the problem lie: marketing, sales, implementation, customer support, operations, IT, HR, finance? How does a company know that their strategic objectives are aligned across departments and support each other?
Our experience with small and large organizations has led us to look first at business strategy. From there, our responsibility typically is to create a marketing strategy that meets business objectives, incorporates risks associated with organizational and marketplace challenges, and supports cross-functional goals and efforts.
This is how StrategyNest has come to define data-driven marketing. It is the alignment of executive level strategic measures with channel level tactical metrics, ensuring marketing efforts are efficient and effective.
At its essence, data-driven marketing is making decisions about how best to use resources, time and budget, to achieve marketing objectives that align with business unit or organizational objectives.
Let’s use an illustration. Senior marketing leadership tasks channel managers to generate more leads. Using brand guidelines and known customer data, channel managers set out to increase lead generation. The outcome is that leads increase and sales increase. Win? Maybe. What if the number of qualified leads as a percent of total leads doesn’t improve? How do they know that the sales completed are good customers that have a lifetime value large enough to justify the cost of acquisition? Does the revenue increase meet the business objectives and strategic direction for the company?
Our approach is different. Senior business leaders ask marketing to increase lead generation. Unlike the previous example, we look at the underlying purpose. Is it just revenue generation, are we improving the percentage of qualified leads provided to sales, or are we expanding the funnel by targeting additional unknown market segments? What is the business after? Expanding marketing share, reaching additional customer groups, improving prospect quality, shortening the sales cycle?
By knowing the reason behind the objective, we are able to better determine a marketing strategy and thus track metrics that align with the business goal. To us, that is what data-driven marketing means. Contact us today and let StrategyNest help you achieve your goals.