Guide: How to Become a Data-Driven Marketer in 7 Steps

It’s no secret to modern growth professionals that becoming a data-driven marketer is vital to success.

According to the New York Times, businesses that used data-driven marketing techniques saw 5–6% higher productivity rates. The fact is, if you want to maximize your marketing ROI, you need to make choices based on data.

Not sure how? Not to worry.

Here are 7 steps to becoming a data-driven marketer today.

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Benefits of Being a Data-Driven Marketer

Before we dive into the “hows” of becoming a data-driven marketer, let’s talk a bit more about the benefits.

Using data and augmented analytics to create your marketing plan can sky-rocket your effectiveness. Some of the ways data will improve your marketing include:

• Knowing how to improve customer experience
• Building a consistent brand
• Zoning in on a specific niche
• Personalizing your campaigns to specific audiences
• Knowing your customers inside-out
• Improving your product development
• Boosting your chances for up-selling

The trick is knowing how to use the data to meet these ends.

Step 1. Gather

First things first, before you can become a data-driven marketer, you have actually to gather the data.

A little research into different types of data-collection software can point you in the right direction. It may help you first ask yourself a few questions to understand better what type of data you want to gather.

These questions may include:

• What is the typical age/gender/race of my customers?
• What are the typical buying habits of my customers?
• Where in the country/world do the majority of my customers live?

Once you know what sort of data you need to improve your marketing efforts, you can more easily choose the best collection software for your business.

One rule of thumb: you can’t have too much data on your customers. This being said, be sure that you’re keeping within local privacy laws.

The last thing you need is to have customers angry with you for illegally collecting data on them. Do some learning about appropriate data-gathering.

Step 2. Analyze

The next step to becoming a fantastic data-driven marketer is to analyze the data properly.

This may entail hiring a group or individual who has experience looking at analytics and interpreting them. You need someone with know-how on how to take a data set and make sense of it.

After all, the data you gather is only as good as what you do with it.

Think about what this information tells you about your customer’s habits online and offline. Use this to shape what you will do to reach them better.

Step 3. Set Goals Based on Data

Before you use your marketing data analytics to create campaign goals, it helps to have broad business goals. For example, do you want to increase sales, gain more subscribers, or inform people about an upcoming event?

Once you know the major goals you’re shooting for, you can use your data analysis to set smaller ones to achieve your larger goals.

Say your larger goal is to sell more double-strollers, and the data you’ve gathered tells you the majority of your customers are male.

With this information, you can set a smaller goal of creating ads that appeal more to soon-to-be fathers. This way, your ads are more likely to be relevant to your existing customer base than if you were to plow ahead with ads targeted mainly to young mothers.

Using data to set marketing goals eliminates wasted dollars and time targeting the wrong people.

This principle applies to all your marketing efforts. The more data, the better your campaigns.

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Step 4. Create Audience-Specific Campaigns

As mentioned in step 3, knowing who you’re reaching helps you create a better marketing strategy.

If the data shows you’re missing your ideal target audience, you can change things up. Use data to design a new ad or marketing campaign that’s more relevant to who you really want to reach.

It may seem like common knowledge that audience-specific campaigns are a better ROI. Still, you’d be surprised how many marketers get lazy about narrowing their campaigns to fit the audience.

Step 5. Use the Right Marketing Tools

What are users doing on your website? Which pages do they spend the most time looking at? How many emails in your last campaign were even opened?

All these questions, and more, can be answered with the right marketing tools.

Before you commit to one marketing tool over another, read some reviews. Do your digging.

It’s definitely worth trying a few free trials to see if certain marketing tools are really up to snuff. Again, this is where knowing your overall marketing goals is important, as they will help you sort through and choose the perfect tools to meet your needs.

Step 6. Automate

The old adage, “time is money,” is especially true when it comes to marketing. Once you’ve gathered and analyzed your data and are ready to put it into use for a campaign, automate.

With lots of data flowing in, it can become too much to sort through.

Automation tools can help you create workflows based on customers' behavior on your site or in your emails. The right automation tool will let you set your own KPI-based goals.

This means you’re getting perfect insights on your users based on your business’ KPIs.

With this kind of automation, you can make sure your customers receive the ideal information for their own specific needs. You can also understand how your latest campaigns, like Facebook Ads, are performing.

With the right kind of automation tools, you can see things like company growth predictions without getting a data specialist to interpret things!

Some automation software even helps you segment your audience based on how they progressed through a campaign. This gives you even more useful data to work with.

Step 7. Review Your KPIs

Collecting data and continually adjusting marketing strategies are great and all, but your ever-changing efforts will also change your KPIs.

Ensure that as you grow and improve your marketing efforts, you’re also reviewing which KPIs are really showing your successes.

You may need to use different KPIs to prove the ROI that data collection offers genuinely.

You may find that you need to use different KPIs to truly prove the ROI that data collection offers.

Getting Started

Use these 7 steps to become a data-driven marketer, and you’re sure to see progress in meeting your marketing goals.

Connect to meaningful data insights today. Our analytics platform will give you access to the info you need and open your eyes to the growth opportunities available for your business. Happy marketing!