How To Use Data To Make Marketing Decisions

Marketing isn’t easy, but using data to make marketing decisions is practically impossible without some training!

Many of us don’t enjoy working with data, for one. That’s a difficult challenge to overcome, but there are more. We’re all only as good as the data we’re working off of, plus we’re also fallible creatures. Of course, none of these decisions are made in a void, and the compounding pressures of groupthink, deadlines, and your boss’s opinion further complicate the situation.

That’s why the marketing experts at JSL Marketing & Web Design put together the following blog on how to use marketing data to make marketing decisions! Each marketing campaign is different, but these overarching principles will guide your data-driven decisions. Ideally, all of these marketing principles will supercharge your marketing campaigns, increase your revenue, and help you reach the best marketing audience.

Benefits Of Data-Driven Marketing

• Confidence: No one wants to “throw spaghetti at the wall.” This is even more true with marketing dollars. Know that you’re making the right call by doing your homework in advance.
• Accuracy: Our intuitions and “gut feelings” can often be incorrect, but that often doesn’t stop us from deciding based on how we feel about a situation. There obviously is a time and place to use intuition. Personal relationships, hiring, and vendor decisions can benefit from a healthy dose of gut feeling, but we would not recommend using your innate sense for more complicated decisions. Use data to navigate those complicated decisions with confidence in the accuracy of the output.
• Perception: By frequently analyzing data, you’re increasing the odds that you discover emerging trends within your business. This is a good thing! If your paid ad campaigns are beginning to falter, year-over-year, investigating is best practice to determine why.

Using Data To Make Marketing Decisions

Make Sure You Have Enough Data

You launched those new Google Ad campaigns and are really excited to see how they have performed after two weeks. You log into the UI, look at CTRs on ad groups, and decide that the bottom two can be paused. Simple, right?

Well, not so fast. A cardinal sin of data analysis is not giving yourself enough data in the first place to work with. Two weeks just isn’t enough time to work with. Outliers, seasonal trends, lack of sample size, and a myriad other factors could impact your data and thus your decision. There is no carved-in-stone rule here; some campaigns and contexts might need different rules of thumb.

For instance, a website that receives 10,000 unique visitors in a month might produce enough data to begin an analysis, versus a site that only generates 1,000. We recommend at least 30 days of data to begin with, but 90 days of data is better. If you’re making a consequential decision, like deciding if you should discontinue a certain marketing campaign or tweak it to improve lagging performance, more than 90 days of data is even better.

Remember Where Your Data Is Coming From

Data is only useful in context. Too often, marketers drown in their own data and forget exactly where it’s coming from and why that matters. Your data isn’t just an amalgamation of numbers; it’s a story about your audience.

For instance, you might see a lot of clicks on your Facebook ads for certain ad sets targeted to women over 40. However, it’s worth remembering that a sizable percentage of Facebook’s users are women over 40, so you’re going to need some corroborating evidence before deciding to prioritize that demographic. Now, if you see this trend across multiple platforms, then you may have some data that suggests women over 40 are your perfect customer!

Communicate The Pros & Cons Effectively

Knowing how to read data is hard, but it’s nowhere near as difficult as communicating that data correctly. Whether you’re talking to your boss, your client, or another department, you’re going to need to present this data in a way that is effective, logical, and comprehensible. That can often be challenging. Your data will look different from context to context, but these tips will be universal.

• Keep It Simple: Find the topline takeaway and demonstrate how it impacts your stakeholder’s bottom line.
• Communicate Why Your Stakeholder Should Care: Why does an improved bounce rate matter? Your stakeholder is likely not a marketing guru, so make sure you tie this to a long term business outcome they want to see.
• Use Visuals: Showing a spike in CTR over time in Excel just isn’t compelling. Help yourself out with some great visuals.
• Don’t Forget About A Personalized Example: Data is great, but a nice little personal example might be worth including as well. If you’re showing how many 5-star reviews you garnered in a month, actually showcasing the words left in a review might make the point even stronger. We all need to use data, but a human example is always a great addition to a presentation to your boss or client.

Know That Correlation Isn’t Causation

This one can be harder for marketers to guard against. For instance, let’s say you see a big spike in web traffic around the holidays. You conclude that your new ad campaign is working and walk away pleased with the results. However, you haven’t actually proved that this spike in traffic is tied to your ad campaign. Maybe your business is seeing a large seasonal spike around the holidays. Maybe some SEO improvements are actually the driver here. Regardless, you can’t just look at data and immediately make a determination of what caused the pleasant results without proving that causation. That’s why proper reporting is so critical for any marketer!

Analyze Your Outliers

Always keep an eye out for any outliers when looking at a data set. Any outlier that is wildly different from its brothers deserves your attention. We are not saying remove outliers, but it might be worth reviewing those outliers to confirm authenticity. If one datum is extremely different, it’s worth a little time to make sure your data is correct. Common reasons to examine outliers include…

• Validating That The Data Is Indeed Correct
• Determining Why The Data Is So Different
• Analyzing How To Apply Learnings From That Data To Other Campaigns
• Examining Conclusions & Findings

Again, we want to reiterate that you should not manipulate your data and remove your outliers. Your outliers are still aspects of your findings and should be examined as such. However, spending a little more time to get under the hood and get familiar with your outlying data offers you opportunities to improve your marketing performance.

If you are looking at your top performing months for sales, you might be surprised to see that a normally slow month is so much better than the rest of the quarter. Let’s suppose that you dig around and realize that your LTO sale, meant to improve sales in a slow quarter, was only promoted via Facebook Ads in the month in question.

The point is, without noticing that outlier and trying to determine why that outlier was the way it was, you’d never have learned that Facebook Ads and a particular sale was a dynamic combo.

Partner With A Trusted Agency Partner For Your Marketing Decisions

Turn to JSL Marketing & Web Design to make those difficult marketing decisions! We’re an award-winning marketing agency for a reason! Our agency team can help you…

• Evaluate Your Brand Messaging & Logo
• Identify Your Perfect Audience
• A/B Test Creatives, Specials, & Messaging
• Grow Your Online SEO
• Market To Your Existing Customer Base

Turn To A 5-Star Forbes Agency Council For Your Marketing. Hire Us Today!