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In the digital age, data and analytics are the backbone of effective marketing strategies. For a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), it’s crucial to overcome the challenge of managing and making sense of vast amounts of data. And if it’s not the CMO, then it’s somebody else in the marketing team. So how can you do it, and how can you lead your team to data and analytics success? Let’s explore some strategies.
First of all, you need to decide what you want to achieve with data and analytics. Establish some key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business goals. Make sure that these are known and understood by everyone on your team.
And when you set those objectives, make sure to get input from sales as well. After all, marketing and sales both work towards the same end result, so it makes total sense. Besides, setting objectives together is an important first step towards sales and marketing alignment.
Equip your marketing team with the necessary data skills. Being able to gather relevant data and understanding it is an important part of marketing these days. Encourage training in data analysis, visualization, and interpretation. You can even hire data specialists to complement your existing team.
The Google Skillshop has a bunch of trainings around all of its products and it’s free of charge. You may also want to check out blogs and video’s that handle a specific part of data or analytics. Even though this is by no means a professional training, doing this will get you a long way.
If you truly want data to play an important role in your organization, you’ll need to promote a data-driven culture within your marketing department. Encourage team members to base their decisions on data and insights rather than gut feelings. Don’t get me wrong: gut feeling is not a bad thing, and sometimes it’s all you have to base decisions on. Furthermore, make your team enthusiastic about data, by recognizing and rewarding data-driven achievements.
Data are not just magically going to gather themselves. To make really use data and analytics successfully, you’ll need to invest in the right tools to get the job done. Of course, use GA4, it’s a given. But that alone is only going to get you so far. and with Looker Studio, you can take data from Search Console, Ads and GA4 and build comprehensive reports that are easy to read. You can also add additional data sources to show even more data.
You may want to invest in a CRM platform that helps you gather tons of data about your buyer persona and stores it centrally. Take Hubspot for instance, a very complete platform that among other things contains a vast amount of reporting capabilities. If set up correctly, you’ll get data from various sources in Hubspot, where you can build dashboards that are relevant to you. On top of that, you’ll be able to automate your marketing too.
And let’s not forget about IP tracking tools like Leadinfo as a source of data. These match IP addresses to companies, all available as public data. These give you great insights on what campaigns worked well, what pages they visited and how often they visited your website. This is valuable information to have.
There are huge amounts of data available that may not fall under the responsibilities of the marketing team. So work closely with your IT team, and your data team if there is one. We have great experiences working with data analysts that look at product information, pricing, etc that are very interesting to have. Your data colleagues usually have enormous amounts of data that can help you refine your marketing activities further.
Collaboration can help you ensure data accuracy and security. It also helps you foster a shared understanding of data importance throughout your business, not just between marketing and sales.
Data is not the sexiest thing in marketing, but it’s so important. So hopefully you can take something away from this blog post that helps your team master data and analytics. In the end, making informed marketing decisions, targeting the right audience and optimizing campaigns based on data will truly help you get a great ROI on your marketing efforts.
We get it: investing in marketing can be a bit scary. But it doesn’t have to be: this ROI calculator gives you a clear idea about what ROI you can expect from your marketing efforts.
