Use Data to Improve Marketing Performance
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the importance of unifying data.
- List three steps for using data to improve marketing performance.
The Importance of Unifying Data
Data is the key to successful marketing. With data, you can unlock insights that drive campaign performance and increase marketing return on investment (ROI).
As essential as data is, it can be tough to bring together when it exists across digital channels. Today’s marketers communicate with customers through email, apps, websites, ads, social media platforms, and more. These touchpoints contain different kinds of data that don’t always speak the same language.
For data-driven marketing to work, marketers have to translate the data they gather into one universal language. Unifying data allows everyone in an organization, regardless of their role, to be on the same page. Bottom line: Bringing your data together improves the customer experience.
How can you unify data in your organization and improve campaign performance? You can get started in three steps.
Three Ways to Use Data for Marketing Performance
- Connect data silos.
- Improve marketing performance.
- Align all teams.
Step 1: Connect Data Silos
Silos contain marketing data that isn’t accessible or understood by everyone in your organization. As a marketer, you might know exactly how to interpret the data in each of these silos, but your colleagues in sales or service might not. To unify data, first list out your data sources, such as digital ads, websites, and social media platforms. What language does each data source speak? Once you’ve identified these individual data languages, it’s time for some translation.
You don’t have to do this manually. In fact, you shouldn’t—it’s time-consuming and frequently inaccurate. Use technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to standardize your marketing data sets so that you’re delivering accurate, real-time insights that your entire organization can understand.
Step 2: Improve Marketing Performance
Once you’ve unified your marketing data, it’s time to put it to work. But data can be overwhelming, especially when you’re pulling it from multiple sources. Where do you start? Begin by turning to the same technology you used to translate your data into a common language. Before putting your data to work, put your tech to work.
Use AI and machine learning to pinpoint what isn’t working in your campaigns—for example, a campaign that’s spending too much or a dip in customer engagement for a certain channel. These are hidden opportunities that allow you to focus on making your campaigns more effective. With the help of digital assistants like AI, you can also analyze translated data much more quickly.
Step 3: Align All Teams
You’ve unified your data. You’ve used technology to analyze that data and improve your campaigns. Now it’s time to bring it all together across your organization’s sales, finance, and product teams.
This doesn’t mean explaining your data-driven insights to each team on an ad-hoc basis, which can be time-consuming and ineffective. It means delivering these insights in terms every team understands, and doing so in real time. Again, you don’t have to do this manually. Use automation to send your insights directly to each team so that they can prioritize testing and optimizing their own performance. When all teams are aligned in this way, you’re more likely to launch successful marketing campaigns across the board.
Data-Driven Marketing
Successful marketing is data-driven. By unifying your data, improving campaign performance, and aligning your teams, you can maximize the potential of every campaign you deliver.