2. Data-Driven Strategy
Data and data analytics has been around for some time now. But the pace at which it was changing the marketing industry accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when marketers could no longer rely on past assumptions about their customers, and found the ‘where’, ‘what’ and ‘how they buy’ questions increasingly hard to answer. Budgets for marketing analytics increased, and marketers today are used to immersing themselves in oceans of data.
Indeed, now, the thought of marketing without data seems extraordinary. ‘You can’t improve what you don’t measure,’ says Ian Ferguson, VP of Marketing and Strategic Alliances at Lynx. Lynx’s software accelerates, cost-reduces, time-reduces and risk-reduces the creation of certifiable safety and cybersecurity platforms. ‘At Lynx, we continually look at where prospects are spending their valuable time on our website, where people are and are not clicking, what’s working with CTAs, etc.’
One advantage of data is that it can show that even experienced marketers’ intuitions about what kind of content will resonate with customers are wrong. Lynx dramatically shortened the length of its email newsletters and product videos after noticing that customers were dropping off early. Now engagement and requests for information are far higher.
For Aline Lemone and her team at ABB, data is an essential part of daily life. ‘Our strategies are 99% data-driven,’ she reveals. ‘Perhaps 95% – I like to leave a little room for us to close our eyes, jump into the unknown, and be creative. But I would say almost all the decisions we make are based on data on the results of our campaigns, how they convert, and what the ROI was.’
It’s a similar story for Scott Horn, who believes that the ability to grapple with data is no longer a nice-to-have for senior marketers, but at the heart of the job. Marketers need to have a working knowledge of numbers, from arithmetic to statistics. ‘Data is absolutely critical,’ he says. ‘Marketing analytics, sales analytics, customer analytics, retention. If you’re a modern marketing leader in 2024 and you’re not comfortable with data – well, you might need to find a different career.’
But data has proliferated to such an extent that marketers can get bogged down in the details. CMOs and senior marketers need to remain mindful of the wider context and how each data point connects to all the others and the overall goals and aims of the business. This is a view that Omer Wilson holds. ‘You could almost get lost in the data now available,’ he says. ‘It’s getting more and more granular. If you look at some of the engagement stats you get from LinkedIn and the other social media channels, there are whole reams of data. It’s important you make sure that you take a more bird's eye view, and not get too lost in the specifics.’
For Heather Vana, an obsession with data can be counter-productive. Marketers need to move away from an ‘all-or-nothing’ approach. ‘We’ve come a long way,’ she says. ‘It’s unreasonable only to make decisions when you have all the data to hand. We’ve become really good at taking data and asking the right questions around it. We then use that as a guide to action.’
