Marketing was always a mixture of art and science, but over recent years leaned more heavily toward science due to the rapid adoption of data-driven marketing. As marketers gain access to more data sets and sources, the utilization of data and insights for marketing purposes is paramount for success.
Data-driven marketing is also more than jargon. Real insights come through marketing funnels and are used to refine marketing campaigns effectively. Marketers can also utilize data sets from various external sources, too. If you are looking for ways to optimize your data-driven approach to marketing, here are the best tips and tricks to utilize.
Stick to a Plan
Data-driven marketing makes marketing programs more fluid and flexible, but that doesn’t mean you should adopt changes every time. Just because y to refine the marketing process, it doesn’t mean each one of them needs to be translated into actual changes immediately. Blips occur naturally, so don’t be tempted to correct for everything, which may lead to over-correction, and, just like your car, when you jerk the wheel suddenly to change course, you can drive right into danger.
It is still necessary to have a marketing plan, particularly for maintaining general alignment and consistency. Without a comprehensive plan – and the ability to stick to it – you end up with a series of marketing activities that are detached from one another, failing to form a consistent approach leading to lower success rates.
What you need is to adjust how you plan marketing campaigns. Instead of creating a rigid plan for every activity, you can allow room for improvement and refinement as metrics warrant. Refinement becomes a part of the plan, and you establish procedures that enable you to stick to the plan at all times.
Cover the Basics
Data-driven marketing gets very complicated very quickly, so you need to ensure the fundamental aspects of your marketing campaign are solid enough to withstand challenges. Solid fundamentals require knowing how to manage campaigns and tasks associated with them meticulously.
More marketers now implement Agile project development as a solution. Combined with data sets and insights, elevating the use of Agile methodology in marketing increases performance. For example, it is much easier to identify issues using the 5 Whys when you have relevant and contextual data to analyze.
As a project management tool, the Kanban board is still the best option for most businesses. This is especially true with cloud-based Kanban solutions like Kanbanize. Kanbanize lets you manage even the most complex campaigns using the improved structure and a wealth of features it offers.
Create Automated Workflows
Another critical component for successful data-driven marketing is automation. Analyzing data and implementing changes based on insights is easy when there are only a handful of elements to handle. Target multiple customers and add personalization to the mix, however, and manual campaign management is no longer an option.
Automation requires a predetermined set of marketing funnels and rules. Establish the rules, define your marketing funnel based on business requirements, and you will find ways to integrate data, and automate certain parts of the workflow easily.
You can also use automation to handle mundane tasks. For instance, you can automate the delivery of follow-up emails when you identify dropped carts, without the necessity of manually sending follow-up emails to customers who abandoned them. Thus, you boost conversion while staying lean and efficient.
Don’t Forget Your Team
The best way to implement data-driven marketing is with the support of a capable team. Team members handling specific tasks improve your ability to utilize data in a meaningful way. The impact of data-driven marketing gets even more significant when team members share the same vision and skill level.
Having a dedicated analyst is a good example. When a team member focuses his time and skills to analyze data and generate insights, you achieve more throughout the marketing campaign. The same is right with other specialists in the team.
Of course, you have the option to outsource portions of the marketing campaign to service providers. Doing so means leveraging the experience and expertise of third-party service providers to your advantage. It also allows you to stay lean as a business.
Measure and Optimize
Last but not least, always make sure you measure the data sets and insights used for marketing purposes as frequently as you monitor the marketing campaigns. Low data quality can still affect your marketing campaigns negatively, which is why optimizing your data sets and sources are essential. Explore the information given by Emerson College on how analytics impacts your marketing strategies. Understanding the numbers behind what’s going on in your business is extremely useful when it comes to optimizing your campaigns. Whether you’re improving your brand storytelling skills or delving deeper into social media management, there is so much you can learn online when it comes to marketing data.
Learning is a continuous process that leads to more improvements. Refining marketing-related data allows you to generate more contextual insights, which will then let you craft more effective marketing campaigns for the business.
After all, data-driven marketing is never a one-time process. Adding data to your marketing processes is only the beginning. How you benefit from data and data-driven marketing depends highly on how you can keep the processes optimized and data-driven.
These tips will help you fully utilize data-driven marketing as part of your business process. Stick to a plan, automate certain parts of the campaigns, and make sure you manage tasks and projects effectively to find more ways to increase the impact of your marketing campaigns.
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