Recently, we had the pleasure of putting together a customized, half-day marketing training in New York City for a large non-profit. The title was: How to Become a Better Data-Driven Marketing Organization.
It’s actually a fascinating topic.
One reason is that there’s no real handbook or guide on how to implement a data-based approach for a company. That may be due to the fact that there’s so much data to take a look at! Even so-called “data-driven organizations” may not fully appreciate all the areas that you need to analyze in order to be really good at marketing a business.
Indeed, contrary to what you might think[1], there are actually 5 types of important marketing data – what we would call 3 strategic data types and 2 operational data types – that are key to both reviewing and acting on within any organization. Let’s cover all of them next.
No. 1: Audience Data (Strategic)
Like the old saying goes: “Everything in marketing starts and ends with your audience.” Data you can collect on your specific audience consists of two types: Qualitative data and quantitative data. Let’s go into a bit of detail about both.
Qualitative Data
When someone asks you to describe your audience, you’d probably answer in more qualitative terms. What are their hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, and loves? What challenges do they face? What are their needs? What do they believe? This is critical data as knowing it can affect how you try to influence buyers’ behavior.
How do you get this data? A couple of ways:
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- Audience Surveys. Surveys are a great place to understand your audiences’ challenges/issues. For each audience segment, you can ask about challenges or probe more deeply into psychographics. Either way, once you collect this data it’s critical to begin thinking how you solve those challenges, address their psychographic state of mind, and make sure that focus underlies your marketing / communications clearly.
- Focus Groups. With focus groups you can collect first-hand information about members, donors, advocates, customers, or whatever segments you have. Typically, agencies, for example, will do focus groups ahead of any website redesigns (in particular) as they will ask about behavior and usability.
- How will they navigate this or that?
- How do you find what you’re looking for?
- How do people discover different brands/companies?
- What attracted them to an organization in the first place?
Quantitative Data
Certainly, there are lots of ways to collect quantitative data on audiences.
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- Surveys (mentioned above). You can do more quantitative type surveys of audiences, where you collect data to compare one group to another group. For example, asking a significant sample of your audience what job title they are, or gender or any other question. That will give you an idea of overall audience breakdowns, which can be helpful.
- Database analysis. You can run an analysis of your existing customers. What percentage of an audiences has the following job titles, is male or female, etc.?
- Analytics (Broader). We find that Google Analytics is a great source of quantitative data. As opposed to looking at campaign performance per se, which we’ll discuss later, we might look here at more strategic-level data:
- What are the most popular areas of the site?
- What did people search for to get to the site and in what volume? (Google search console)
- What were the channels that brought people to the site and in what percentage?
- How many people searching for certain terms (on site – internal search appliance)?
- What content are audiences consuming? And in what volume?
- What’s the mobile percentage? Demographic breakdown?
- What’s the audience interest data?
- What site goals are getting completed?
No. 2: Broader Trend Data (Strategic)
We often say marketers don’t look at trend data as much as they perhaps should. What do we mean by this? It could be any number of trends that are currently happening in marketing and should be closely followed. Here are 4 of the many trends that at worth following:
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- Internet Bandwidth Access: Faster connections mean one thing primarily: More high-quality video. So, if you know that – and you know that 82 percent of all Internet traffic is actually video consumption by audiences – does that actually change how you’d market? It should, if you really think about it. (Translation: Do more video. 😊)
- Emerging Technologies (AR in Particular): With faster connections come additional technologies that can be employed on your website pages, e-commerce and apps. For example, let’s say you’re a retail shopping site. More and more, these companies are turning to augmented reality (AR) technology so customers can “try on” clothes, see how furniture fits in their homes, or see how a certain shade of makeup looks on them. If you’re a retail site without this, you might be starting to fall behind.
- Newly Emerging Social Platforms: 4 years ago, TikTok wouldn’t have been on many marketers’ radars. But today, it’s one of the main platforms on the Internet to reach 15-25 year olds. Meanwhile, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest have continued to see their followings flatten or drop. If you’re marketing, knowing where your audiences are from a social media perspective will be a critical data point to continue to follow.
- The Move Away from Desktop Toward Mobile: More and more, individuals are doing everything on a mobile device, which means fewer and fewer people are accessing information on a desktop computer. As that trend continues, you can expect more mobile-first websites and experiences that should be catered more exclusively to phones.
Those are just four and don’t even include all the recent AI or other broader trends that are being adopted and used by marketers today.
No. 3: Competitive Data (Strategic)
We can’t emphasize enough the need for companies to both analyze and adapt to what competitors are doing in their space. We get that it’s one more data type to look at, but you can learn a ton about the market you’re in just by analyzing what your competitors are doing and how they’re approaching similar customers. Here’s some data you can acquire on competitors easily:
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- Overall brand narrative and approach
- Website structure & UX (esp. page speed)
- Content/SEO (with a competitive analysis tool)
- Email marketing (frequency and other tactics)
- Paid display ads (visuals from moat.com, adbeat.com) & retargeting techniques
- Paid search (with a competitive analysis tool)
- YouTube/Social Presence (frequency, engagement etc.)
If you need help getting started here, you can download our free guide to analyzing any competitor.
Ok, so we’ve gone through the first 3 strategic data types. What do you do with this? These are the three data types that help you establish your brand narrative and strategic marketing direction, something we’ve discussed a lot about in these pages. Next, we’ll go through the operational data types, which help you to better make decisions on the optimizations you’ll want to make on a more ongoing basis.
No. 4: Marketing Best Practices Data (Operational)
In previous blogs, we’ve discussed the importance of marketing tactics within each channel. In particular, we’ve mentioned there are thousands of tactics that can be employed within different campaigns to try to get to move individuals further down the funnel. (In this post, we chose 15 we particularly like.) All of those tactics are based on data, really.
That’s how knowing marketing best practice data can help you be better, too. Here’s a quick example of 6 pieces of data worth knowing (of the thousands of marketing best practices you should be using today).
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- According to Google, a one-second website speed improvement can increase conversions for mobile users by up to 27%.
- Triggered emails are opened on average at 25.4% – about 78 percent better than non-triggered messages.
- Companies that post 20x per month in LinkedIn reach 60 percent of their audience.
- Video ads can improve click-thru rates over static ads by 20 to 30 percent acc. to some studies.
- Best practice suggests that every page on your website should have 5 internal links pointing to it.
- Adding a blog to your website can boost your website traffic by up to 55 percent, acc. to some studies.
As with everything, the question here is not just knowing what the best practice is. It’s actually implementing it. That takes ongoing resources and, in some cases, budget.
No. 5: Campaign Data Performance
What’s interesting is that when people think of data-driven organizations, they tend to think of companies that optimize the performance of campaigns. And there’s certainly merit to this in the sense that, if this was the only data you looked at and acted upon, you’d be a pretty good data-driven organization after all. Certainly, this involves Google Analytics too (similar to the Qualitative data we pulled on our audience) but we’re interested here in more of the campaign-specific data (visits due to advertising promotions, conversion actions, or goal completions.) But it’s not just Google Analytics. It also includes:
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- Email performance (opens, clicks, conversions)
- Social media performance (likes, shares, comments, clicks, potential conversions)
- Content performance (views, visits, downloads, etc.)
- Video performance (views, completion rates, clicks)
- Advertising performance (impressions, clicks, conversions, and many other KPIs)
- SEO/ranking improvements (rank position/position improvement, site authority, volume of inbound links)
- E-commerce performance (visits, visit-to-checkout percentage, abandon cart percentage, abandon cart fulfillment, product page visits etc.)
- Mobile app engagement etc. (Total engagement, use frequency, etc.)
Making the Optimizations You Need
Then, of course, after you’ve analyzed and collected all the key data you need, the big question comes next: What are you going to do to improve? This might be the most difficult thing for most organizations. Why? There are 4 reasons we often see:
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- Reason No. 1: You have to interpret the data correctly.
- Reason No. 2: You have to commit the resources and the time to be able to do it. “I already have a full-time job!”
- Reason No. 3: The work itself can seem tedious and it requires a lot of attention to detail in some cases.
- Reason No. 4: Change is hard. If you have an ego about strategy or an approach you picked, the data can prove you dead wrong.
In the face of all this, what can you do?
The most important thing is to make time for it. Add time to your schedule to review your marketing performance at the very least. And then also allocate time to make the adjustments you need. Want to know the difference between an average marketing organization and a great one? The best ones are constantly looking at data and optimizing their different channels.
Second, ask yourself how good you want to be. You can start by paying attention to little best-practice details as part of a process improvement.
Lastly, one thing we always say: “Don’t worry about failing, worry about constantly improving. In a way, you have to develop what Carol Dweck said many years ago about developing a “growth mindset.” Be constantly willing to try things, test and see what works. Then make adjustments. When you find the key, then you can stick with it.
If you need additional help with your marketing, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll be happy to provide a free consultation about your needs, and apply many of these data-driven best practices.
[1] Many people conflate being data-driven with campaign performance data. That’s certainly important but it’s only one of five important data types.