10Stories Blog Why Be A Data-Driven Marketer, Anyway?

If you want to tank a job interview, the fastest was to do it is to admit one of these two things:I make decisions based on intuition instead of data.I don't care about how much revenue our marketing is tied to.(More on that second one here.)The funny thing is, data driven marketing isn't a new concept. Nielsen created their famous TV ratings in 1950, but it doesn't seem that anybody told the Mad Men crowd that they could market using anything other than scotch and casual sexism. Before you dive into a world where spreadsheets are the only source of truth and every statement has to have a citation, it's worth understanding what's so different about data today. It comes down to 3 things.Data is PersonalDid you know that 20% of searches made each day on Google have never been seen before? And yet, Google seems to be doing OK. Getting better, even, based on those novel searches.Online analytics track every pageview, click, form fill, and signup. It's easy to look at numbers like "Total Unique Sessions" and forget about the people behind the numbers. From those sessions, did you find the people who accidentally clicked on your hiring page because it was right next to the link for your blog? Hubspot, 10Stories, Marketo, and others can tell you what happened down to the individual person.The power of online marketing is that it's all connected. Of course you can see how many people bought from you; the Sears catalog could do that in 1980. What you couldn't do is follow that person backwards and tie it to where they heard about you, what they researched, and how long it took.Data is Real-TimeWith automated data collection, analytics tools don't rely on humans for anything, so data can be delivered and acted on as it comes in. Counterintuitively, this is most important for products with slower sales cycles. If most leads need email nurturing before engaging with the product, it's crucial to get the top-of-funnel tuned up early. Ignoring the A/B test results from ad campaigns can mean a slow trickle into your nurture streams, leaving you wondering whether those nurture streams are effective. By reacting early to opportunities at the top of the funnel, it creates the tools you need to push leads through the middle and bottom of the funnel. Turning a big ship means turning the wheel earlier, not throwing up your hands and declaring it can't be turned!This also means that data sets can and do change. Cohorts can stay open as long for months before stabilizing, and weekly metrics can seem to dance if definitions are revised. For instance, increasing the threshold for lead scoring can mean more qualified leads, but it means naively comparing the "# of leads" from previous programs is no longer valid. Separating the data analysis and definitions from the data itself is crucial, since everything must happen without human intervention.Data is HugeCombine the previous two sections and you get one clear result: there's a TON of information to sift through.Strategies like "give me a spreadsheet and I'll take a look" don't work anymore. Can you download 50 million clicks in a single file and look at it to get a sense of what's happening? Pre-built reports are critical in deciphering the broad strokes of going on. Worse yet, every report raises more questions than it answers, meaning deeper drilldown is always necessary to fully understand what's available.So why be data-driven?If we're generating more data that's harder to understand, why embrace this new world at all?Because you can close the loop.Instead of a broadcast, marketing is a conversation. As your leads learn about you and your product, you learn from them. You can make specific changes against specific goals. Every program is a new conversation, every day is an opportunity to learn, and every week is an opportunity to try something new.Data isn't about taking the intuition out of marketing. It's about testing, honing, and improving that intuition as fast as possible.