Data is no longer an optional add-on for your campaigns — it’s a given. To demonstrate your ROI as a marketer, you should be able to track your results and predict buyer behavior on a given campaign, which should include KPIs, measurements and metrics in your strategy. Referring to these metrics will help to determine whether or not you’re moving in the right direction.
Improving marketing predictability through data requires multiple trials (and often many errors) to determine what works. Be sure you’ve set your marketing and CRM systems up to deliver as much real-time data as you possibly can, and then analyze it carefully. Ensure you’re tracking both tactics and strategy. Keeping account of whether your tactics are working, whether your models are correctly calibrated, and the success of your targeting is essential to understanding the current and future actions of your campaign.
When analyzing data, it is important to ask yourself the following questions: Are the tactics you’ve employed in the past performing as you predicted they would? Is it time to modify your predictions or work new tactics into the mix to bring more leads into the funnel? Are your lead scoring methods accurately predicting a lead’s likelihood to close? Or do you need to modify your models based on new data and insights? In order to optimize your predictability and performance, you should be able to answer these questions.
Rather than making big, sweeping shifts to your campaigns and processes, try tweaking just one thing at a time, and testing that change during a period of focused analysis. As you become more comfortable predicting campaign performance and analyzing it in real time, this will begin to feel more like a science than an art. Stay at it long enough, keep making improvements, and soon you’ll be able to determine the impact of nearly every element of your marketing program with a fair level of accuracy. And isn’t that every marketer’s dream?
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