Are you really doing data-driven marketing or do you just think you are?

By definition, data-driven marketing is the strategy of gathering and analyzing audience insights for optimal and targeted media buying and creative messaging. 

In reality, it is one of the most talked about topics in marketing today which is no surprise since business success largely depends on the quality, quantity and way you interpret that data.

Marketers have been hearing “big data” catapulted around as a buzzword for years now and they know that data-driven marketing is vital to the success of their marketing. And most of them think they’re doing it. And, I can tell you, most of them are wrong.

They are striving to gather as much customer data as they can, drawing assumptions from the insights, applying them to their marketing and waiting for the revenue to start rolling in. They could be waiting a while. 

Are you mistaking data-driven marketing for data-driven assumptions?

In the days when marketing data was scarce, intuition and gut-based marketing reigned supreme. However, now marketing teams are awash with data. Analytically inclined marketers have effectively won the intuition versus data-driven insights mindshare battle.

As companies continue to gather data in order to better engage with and serve relevant advertising and content to consumers, have marketers made the shift to using this data to inform and guide their decisions? Or in reality, are they just making educated guesses based on that data? 

The question I always ask is, how many data-driven tests are you performing? If a marketer says none, then they are not doing data-driven marketing. 

Your testing roadmap to success

The best data-driven marketers are creating structured multivariate testing roadmaps, where they are testing everything from targeting to bidding strategies to creatives.

Multivariate testing is a technique for testing a hypothesis in which multiple variables are modified with a goal of determining which combination performs best.

It uses the same core mechanism as A/B testing, but compares a higher number of variables, and reveals more information about how these variables interact with one another.

That being said, your roadmap should still include A/B tests that run the exact same campaigns at the exact same time with just one different variant, for example, the creative.

This allows you to pinpoint exactly what is working for your marketing strategy and, more importantly, what is not.

In reality, testing is the only way to come up with a scientific conclusion. By creating an extensive testing roadmap you can execute marketing strategies that you know are going to be effective, and then keep optimizing them.

The test-and-learn approach leaves nothing to chance 

Having been in this industry for many years (more than I care to admit to!), I often have brands asking me whether or not certain platforms will work for them.  Will Instagram work for my brand? My answer, test it. 

Would it be better to use both Facebook and Instagram? Stories as a format? Video? Different creatives? Test it. My advice is always to use whatever works for your brand. And it’s worth noting that even two hotel brands from the same vertical can both have different outcomes and therefore very different resulting strategies.

We have the luxury of being able to use this endless stream of data to leave nothing to chance. We don’t need to rely on the “spray and pray” marketing approach, advertising your business everywhere and anywhere with no real direction. And we shouldn’t be advertising on platforms just because we think we should. That will simply exhaust your resources and more importantly, budget.

Be more intentional with your marketing techniques and consciously work out what is the best structure for your brand. Base it on facts. Facts, not assumptions. 

Data-driven marketing involves, above all, taking a smart approach to the customers’ data. Your ability to outline an effective route in this wealth of data plays a crucial role.

It is very difficult to assume which marketing decisions will work. The only way to know for sure is to test and learn.

Long story short, the buzzwords aren’t going away anytime soon so marketers who champion a test-and-learn approach to data-driven marketing will be the ones who see the most successful results in the long term and will also be the ones who can safely say they are basing their decisions on data and not assumptions. 

And that is what will lead you to those revenue dollars rolling in!