5 Common Misconceptions About Data-Driven Marketing
Data-driven marketing is relatively new; the tools to measure the effect of your marketing efforts haven’t been around that long. So, it’s only normal that there are a lot of questions about what is needed for a successful data-driven marketing approach. Here are the 5 misconceptions I come across most often in my practice.
1. “I need a lot of data before I can use data-driven marketing.”
Most companies don’t have a lot of data when they start with data-driven marketing, because this is their first marketing effort or they didn’t collect data until then. Luckily, you don’t need vast amounts of data to be able to get all the benefits of a data-driven approach.
The goal of data-driven marketing is first of all getting more customers, leads, sales and conversions. To that end, we deploy marketing campaigns, but unlike traditional marketing we also collect data to measure success or failure. This allows for a focus on what works and prevents spending a lot of money on ineffective strategies, maybe even without realizing it.
So, data-driven marketing consists of marketing and data analytics; not just data-analytics. The marketing part of data-driven marketing will create the data needed to guide further actions, so you don’t need data to start with.
2. “At least a few hundred customers have to buy my product before I can use data-driven marketing.”
Of course not! That would be a world gone mad. It is the task of data-driven marketing to get more customers, not the task of the number of customers to allow for data-driven marketing. Data-driven marketing simply turns on the light when you would otherwise be in the dark about the results of your marketing efforts.
3. “I can only use data-driven marketing after my product is launched.”
No; it is even better to start with marketing when the development of the first version of the product or MVP is still in progress. This allows you to use customer feedback while developing and launching a product that is more in line with demand. Of course, a product that fits demand better leads to more sales. Examples of data-driven marketing in the pre-sales phase are email subscriptions, community building and social media marketing. All of which also give you valuable customer feedback.
4. “Data-driven marketing is about creating insight, not results.”
Absolutely not! The primary goal of data-driven marketing is getting results by letting data guide the way to successful strategies, content and channels. Instead of using gut feeling and previous experiences to pick a marketing strategy, we use data to identify what works and what does not.
This also allows you to know for sure that you’re following the most successful strategy. If you don’t measure and compare results across channels, you’ll never know if another approach would have resulted in more sales for less cost.
5. “I need a lot of traffic to my website before I can deploy data-driven marketing.”
If you mainly sell products on your website, a goal of data-driven marketing is definitely increasing traffic to your website (and subsequently the number and amount of sales), but it is not a prerequisite to already have a lot of traffic beforehand. What is true for the number of customers, as we mentioned above, is also true for the website traffic; you don’t need large numbers to start with. The whole point of data-driven marketing is to drive business, while being smart about it, by measuring the impact of marketing efforts.
What additional concerns do you have about data-driven marketing? Let us know at info[at]theleanmarketingcollective[.]com or book a free consultation.