Data allows us to both create and measure successful marketing campaigns. It helps drive strategy and optimize effectiveness. Because of this impact, implementing a data-driven approach is important for marketers right now, and will become an absolute necessity in the months ahead.
In September, we covered the need to replace the Old Marketing Value Chain with a New Marketing Value Chain. The “old” way relies on the application of “rules and tools” to attain marketing success, tapping into conventional wisdom, best practices and mastery of tools. Although those inputs work to make the output more predictable, a certain amount of waste was inevitable.
Our current marketing landscape is dynamic. With its ever-changing conditions, a rule that works in one instance may not work in another. And with its ever-evolving technology, even the best tools can quickly become outdated.
A data-driven approach is at the core of the New Marketing Value Chain. Thanks to shifts in technology and customer behavior, marketers now have an expansive amount of data at their fingertips. By analyzing that data, drawing out relevant insights and using them to make decisions about strategy, creative and technology, we’re able to further minimize waste and make marketing performance more predictable than ever before.
While marketers continue to tap into a rapidly growing amount of data, many of us are still working to determine which types of data are most helpful for specific initiatives and which tools are necessary to analyze and apply the data in an accurate, meaningful way. So much is happening in the field of research and development, and technology is evolving at a breathtaking rate. In the future, as we figure out exactly what data we need, how to best capture it and how to pull out actionable insights, we’ll also more fully experience the true power of data in marketing.
This new data-driven approach has already had an impact on marketing plans, both in guiding strategy and optimizing effectiveness. It also has the potential to provide a competitive advantage to marketing organizations that truly leverage data and analytics. But we also need to dig deeper. We need to put analytical skills into practice, integrate multiple data sources, push for more sophisticated modeling tools. Moving forward, data’s impact on marketing will only grow as we gain access to more data, better analytics tools and a greater knowledge of how to use them.
How will you dig deeper into data in the year ahead?
Photo Credit: Anders Sandberg via Flickr Creative Commons
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