How to Use Data to Guide Your Decision Making

Data-driven marketing is a phenomenal leap forward for our practise, as it provides true insight into the marketplace and allows us to tailor our strategies to make more effective decisions. 
 
The digital environment has given Marketers the tools to exert more control over our campaigns through the feedback offered by this data. However, it’s all about how you use it. 
 
Vinay Tadepalli from Brandalism explains more about this in depth about how to use data effectively to drive better decision making in business. 

There is a growing reliance on the internet to perform activities like socialising, information search, and purchasing. This has attracted a vast amount of competition to win the customer’s attention (which is immensely short these days).  

With the proliferation of data, marketing has changed dramatically over the past few decades. It is now highly data-driven, and decisions can now be backed up by hard factual data instead of solely based on intuition.  ​

What is data-driven marketing?  

The question then is: what is data-driven marketing? Data-driven marketing is the approach of optimising communications based on real consumer data. This consumer data can be used to predict what their needs, wants, desires and future behaviour might be. By successfully collecting, interpreting and utilising data, marketers can develop personalised marketing strategies for the highest possible ROI.   ​

What data is really out there? 

By combining marketing and sales data, you can begin to form a complete picture of who your audience is. This allows you to understand which traffic source produces the highest sales, which ad campaign results in the lowest return rate, and better understand the customer’s journey. Data can help tell the story of your customer from information search, all the way to product and service review.  ​

What are some of the benefits of using data in your marketing?  

Put simply, the most significant benefit of utilising data to guide your marketing decisions is that it takes the guesswork out of the equation and instead, you have hard factual information on what your audience cares about, where they are likely to be and what their pain points and needs are.  
 
Some additional benefits include the following:  
  

1. Data offers the ability to connect with your audience and potential customers more effectively. By utilising data, you can cater to exactly what the customer is looking for, and as a result, your advertisements are most likely going to perform consistently better than your competitors.  
2.  Data also has the potential to reveal where your audience is likely to be now and in the future. Insights such as this could help position the message where your target audience is or is going to be soon.    
3. Personalisation: Customers are now savvier than ever before, and generic marketing messages do not cut it anymore. A study by Adlucent revealed that 71% of the respondents preferred ads tailored to interests and shopping habits. With data-driven marketing, you will not only be able to find out where your audience is but can also personalise the experience for each customer.  

Some of the challenges faced by business to implement data-driven marketing:  

1. It might seem like a daunting task to gather data at first, but you'll most likely already have access to large amounts of data from sources like:  

       a. CRM ​       
       b. Website analytics like google analytics.  
       c. Social media  
       d. E-commerce tools  
       e. Advertising tools like Google marketing platform and Facebook business manager.   

These can help indicate customer interactions. However, having access to large amounts of data leads to another problem. 
 
2. Having the most relevant data is extremely important as you should utilise real-time information where possible to make the most of data-driven marketing. However, the challenge is pulling and updating such large amounts of data manually. A marketing dashboard can summarise this data into meaningful and actionable information automatically which will help to view all of the insights in one place.   
 
3. Determining the right tools and platforms for the organisation is essential so that you can make sure to have a single source of truth you can work from. A common problem across multiple organisations is that the data collected is unfortunately not utilised or the systems don’t communicate which each other, leaving your data in silos.  

At Brandalism, we use the following steps to overcome data-driven challenges:  
​

1. Start with the data.  
2. Ask a question of what information you have available to you.  
3. Construct a hypothesis.  
4. A/B test!  
5. Analyse the results from the A/B test.  
6. Analyse the data and draw conclusions.  

 
Remember - this is not a simple task and will require repeating some steps as you go through the process. It also requires performing multiple hypothesis testing to achieve the desired results, but in the end, data-driven decisions will ultimately help drive marketing success.  
 
Sources:  
https://www.adverity.com/data-driven-marketing/ 
 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2018/12/18/how-to-overcome-the-challenges-of-data-driven-digital-marketing/#76c209c44767.  
 
Thank you, Vinay, for your guest blog post. ​

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