Data-Driven Marketing: Stay Goal-Oriented

Marketers are also important members of the web analytics community. Like Neo in The Matrix, marketers must choose between the blue pill of happily continuing down the same path marketing has marched since John Wanamaker’s time—free spending ways, squishy-fuzzy metrics, and low accountability—and the eye-opening red pill that reveals what’s really happening to their company’s digital marketing initiatives. Being held accountable for a new multimillion-dollar social campaign or a major website redesign may cause some marketers to seek a safer and more familiar path. Leave that fear, uncertainty, and doubt of data (FUDD) to your competitors. Swallow the red pill of data-driven marketing. The benefits will outweigh the costs, so long as you don’t lose sight of the fact that data is a means to an end, not the destination itself.

One key is to keep your data-driven marketing goal-oriented rather than metric-oriented. Don’t be swayed by the mountain of marketing books with audacious titles like 301 Marketing Metrics Your Mother Didn’t Teach You. These books have it completely backwards. You don’t begin your data-driven journey by cherry picking key performance indicators (KPIs) from a list; instead, you start by concentrating on your key marketing goals and objectives. If your KPIs are not properly aligned to your business goals, they can actually lead you astray, doing more harm than good.