Data-driven marketers know the importance of making incremental changes to their campaigns without taking risks that could hurt the overall results or making too many changes at once. Is your marketing strategy set up to collect accurate data about what’s working and provide the insights needed to guide change?
Follow these steps to keep your marketing data-driven:
Learn from the wins and losses of your competitors, collaborators and others in your industry. Some careful research to see where others in your field have found success can save your own organization a lot of time and money.
Great resources for this data include:
Don’t forget to include insights from your own past work. What tactics have proven useful in past campaigns? Do they apply to your current projects?
Never get so excited about an idea you have to improve your marketing’s performance that you forget the importance of incremental testing. If you change more than one thing about your marketing at a time, you won’t be able to determine the source of any effects, positive or negative.
Whether it’s a change to your content delivery methods or your marketing’s targeting, set a consistent timeframe for making changes. Even if you begin to see negative results, leave your new program in place for this defined period of time to gather meaningful data. Then, analyze it to see why you got the result you did.
Another way to determine the impact of individual marketing changes is to test two or more versions of a given marketing message. Again, change only one thing in each version so that you can accurately attribute any differences in their performance.
A/B testing can be done in every marketing channel. Simply segment your audience, run the test and collect and analyze the data. A/B testing can be done on calls-to-action, marketing images, changes in copy, time of delivery and more.
The key to each and every one of the above methods for adjusting marketing with minimal risk is careful record keeping. In order to analyze data and gather actionable results, you first have to collect data that is complete and clean. Before beginning marketing changes of any kind, review your data collection process to ensure that this is the case.
Do you feel prepared to move forward with marketing testing? Find out how marketing changes made a major impact for Movéo partners in our library of case studies.
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