It’s no secret that data-driven marketing is the key to marketing success today. This is evidenced by the thousands of data analytics platforms at your exposure as well as the opinions from experienced marketers.

According to Forbes, companies that adopt data-driven marketing are more likely to have an advantage over the competition and increase profitability. Additionally, they are actually six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year. That’s huge!

While data-driven marketing is the name of the game, an astounding 81% of marketers say adopting a data-driven marketing approach is somewhat to extremely complicated. That means that while there is a general agreement that data-driven marketing is the way to be successful, less than 20% of marketers feel like they can easily adopt a data-driven strategy.

The infographic below offers some great insights into top objectives for marketer, top challenges, and how those objectives and challenges relate to each other. This infographic will prove that if you’re struggling, you’re in good company.

Since the purpose of any article is not to simply point out challenges, but to learn how to get better, let’s use the information in this infographic to find solutions on how to become a better data-driven marketer.

1. Identify marketing objectives

Sometimes the best way to start with data-driven marketing is to dive right in. With the help of recent research and your marketing team, you can quickly identify what it is you may need to prioritize.

A good place to guide your brainstorming may be to check out the top top data-driven marketing objectives from the study used to create this infographic. Results were as follows:

• Basing more decisions on data analysis (51%)
• Acquiring more new customers (45%)
• Integrating data across platforms (43%)
• Enriching data quality and completeness (37%)
• Segmenting target markets (34%)
• Attributing sales revenue to marketing (33%)
• Aligning marketing and sales teams (31%)

While your data-driven marketing objectives may vary slightly, every marketer can benefit from prioritizing things like making more decisions that are rooted in analytics and integrating data across platforms, to name a few.

2. Pinpoint your challenges

It’s often easy to create objectives, but to stay rooted and really create a strategy that will work for you, it’s important to understand your limitations. Again, these limitations will vary depending on where you work, what your resources are, what software you currently use, and what your budget is. However, being able to compare the top challenges of fellow marketers can be helpful.

According to the study used to form this infographic, top challenges for adopting a data-driven marketing approach included:

• Being able to make more data-based decisions
• Integrating data across platforms in a single view
• Enriching data quality and completeness

Forrester and DMA also found that understanding customer interactions across all touchpoints was the #1 challenge for marketers in that study.

While these are certainly challenges, the good news is each of these challenges have viable and quick solutions.

3. Adopt smart solutions

No matter what your marketing budget is, the time is now to make data-driven marketing a priority. Yes, this will come with some challenges as outlined above, but there are a multitude of effective solutions. Let’s talk about them.

How to enrich data quality and completeness.

According to the infographic, several marketers struggled with gathering quality and complete data. This is especially interesting considering most marketers could identify the top channels for effectively collecting data and 97% of respondents mentioned these channels were getting more effective at collecting data.

The best way to collect rich and complete data is to find an analytics platform that deals specifically with that particular channel. For example, if you are looking to collect insights via social media, it’s vital to check out analytics tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, SproutSocial, and more. Similarly, if you need insights from your website, you need to be well versed in Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, etc.

Once you start going down the list of different data collection methods and channels to connect with customers, this can start to seem overwhelming. This leads us to the second challenge as well as the second solution.

Integrating all data across platforms into a single view.

Since many marketers listed understanding customer interactions across all touchpoints as the #1 challenge, it’s important to find a way to collect and view data in a way that makes more sense.

Rather than manually logging into each separate data platform and trying to make assertions, it’s important to invest in a dashboard that integrates with all the top analytics tools across all martech and adtech platforms. Popular tools include things like TapClicks, Tableau, Datorama, Domo, etc.

What a tool like this will do is integrate all of your data into one, beautiful dashboard. This not only helps you draw quick conclusions based on a robust data set, but it will save you hours and hours of time by eliminating the need to report manually.

In this solution lies the answer to the next problem.

Being able to make more data-based decisions. 

Once your data are organized into a single-view, it’s much easier to make data driven choices. With the click of a button, you can quickly see how your campaigns are performing, which campaigns are failing, and where you need to make changes.When you take steps to collect more robust data and to organize it efficiently, you’ll find your data-driven marketing objectives will start to be realized.

Wrap Up

In the following infographic, you’ll come to understand the reality of data-driven marketing. It’s important but it’s also difficult for many marketers. Use the insights in this infographic as well as the information in this article to make a stronger data-driven marketing strategy that will help your company thrive.

About the Author

Lane Harbin is Senior Content Marketing Manager at Campaign Monitor, an easy-to-use email marketing tool that allows every marketer to send targeted newsletters to grow their business. With beautiful templates, a drag-and-drop interface and engagement-based segmentation, Campaign Monitor has helped more than 200,000 growing businesses take their email marketing to the next level.