Data is changing marketing. Once upon a time it was difficult to track marketing initiatives directly to revenue, but today marketers and business owners have access to data and analytics to inform decision making. Companies large and small that take advantage of their data have a competitive edge on those that do not. Here a four steps to creating a data-driven marketing strategy.
Define Business Goals
Most likely you have business goals in place, but it never hurts to review and possibly revise them going into the new year. Ensure your goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. An example of a SMART goal is “grow business revenue by X% in 2020.”
However, while this may be your primary goal, you also need to identify how you will achieve it. Supporting goals may include:
- “Increase repeat purchases by X”
- “Grow membership by X”
- “Grow purchases of X product by X”
Identify KPIs
Once you have your goals in place, you need to identify your key performance indicators — sales and marketing metrics that help you measure whether you are reaching your goals. In order to do this, you also need to know what data and analytics you have access to. Data sources that will inform your marketing plan may include:
- Google Analytics: Website traffic and marketing funnel data such as which online channels are driving traffic and purchases, how prospects are interacting with your website, and which online content is driving more engagement and conversions.
- CRM & Marketing Automation (e.g., SalesForce or HubSpot): Sales data such as sales cycle time, how many leads are qualified, number of touch points leading to sales, and sales revenue.
- Customer survey: Anecdotal customer data about customer satisfaction and feedback on specific products or services.
- Email marketing platform: such as subscriber growth, churn rate, deliverability, and best time or day to send emails to your lists.
- Social media insights: Data such as audience growth, social engagement, and reach.
Once you know where you can source your data, you can identify KPIs. These can range from high level to granular, but to keep it simple, start high level. Examples of KPIs are:
- Sales revenue
- Cost per acquisition
- Lead to customer ratio
- Marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead ratio
- Customer retention rate
- Website traffic (organic, paid, social, email…)
- Return on ad spend
Compile & Analyze
Once you’ve identified your data sources and KPIs, create a dashboard and fill in your data to see your success month over month (or quarterly). While Google Sheets or Excel are great tools for this, you can also automate reporting using tools like Google Data Studio, Dash This, HubSpot or even SalesForce.
Next, analyze your results. This analysis will be the foundation of your data-driven marketing plan. Note that you may find some outliers in your data that require you to complete additional research. For example, if your social media traffic skyrocketed one month or your email open rate suddenly started to decrease. Maybe your revenue dropped significantly one month. You’ll want to understand why.
Create Your Data-Driven Marketing Plan
Now, you’re ready to create your new marketing plan! To help you, here’s a marketing strategy outline to get started.
- Current state
- Summary of 2019
- SWOT
- Market insights
- Competitor analysis
- Value proposition, pricing, positioning
- Target market
- Goals, objectives and KPIs for the year
- Budget
- Strategy
- Marketing channels
- Budget allocation
- Key initiatives (referral campaign, partnerships, product launch)
- Tactics (revamp website, launch Google Ads, create new content)
- Marketing channels
Do you need help with creating or implementing your marketing strategy? Contact us today to talk about your business.
