Are you facing increasing pressure from your leadership team to
justify your marketing decisions? Most marketers can no longer afford to
make decisions based on intuition or gut feel. Today, making good
decisions requires data. Data and technology enable marketers to act and
react.

Very few marketers would suggest that data is not essential to being
more effective. And most organizations are not lacking data. Data is
everywhere. The real challenge is gathering, extracting, analyzing, and
presenting data to drive decision-making and action. Marketing
organizations that leverage data to maximize their efforts and optimize
their marketing investments are considered data-driven cultures.

Data-driven marketing organizations are able to act and react in a
more agile manner, successfully attaining business goals and maximizing
their efforts and marketing investments. Such organizations embrace data
and have an analysis-action-oriented company culture.

Making Decisions Based on Data

Combining data and analysis helps marketing identify new customer
segments that will deliver higher profits, current customers with the
greatest value potential, and new products that will be the most
relevant both to new and current customers.

Marketing can then act on that data by developing and implementing
marketing initiatives that will have the greatest likelihood of success.
They also use the data to measure the success of marketing initiatives,
adjusting and optimizing strategy and programs to ensure achievement of
goals.

To effectively leverage data for action, you need to be able to take
the following five steps:

1. Purposefully collect and analyze your data.
Purposeful data collection and analysis efforts focus on answering
questions that are tied to identified needs and goals. Reward your team
for analysis—not the mere collection of data.

2. Establish a data infrastructure. For data to
be collected and used effectively, you will need people with analytical
skills, access to the right tools, and data-storage technology. All
three are key ingredients of your data infrastructure.

3. Implement a process for collecting and using the data—and
repeat the process regularly. Data-driven marketing organizations
recognize that they need to develop and maintain a process to support
ongoing data cleansing, collection, and analysis. They use the process
to help identify where and when adjustments may be needed.

4. Collaborate with colleagues and their leadership team.
Data-driven marketing organizations recognize the value that their
colleagues and leadership team bring to the process.

They engage their leadership team in the process as a way to
facilitate communication and collaboration with those in Finance, Sales,
Customer Service, IT, and others who may be needed to support the
initiative.

Data-driven marketing organizations periodically review the
data, infrastructure, and processes to ensure they have the right data
in place to drive decisions and action.

5. Focus on data that connects marketing to the business.
Most marketing organizations have more data than they know what to do
with. To be effective takes selective focus, so focus on the specific
types of data that will help you demonstrate and improve the value of
marketing to the organization.

Ready to take the plunge? Here are six more steps that every
organization can take to become a data-driven marketing organization:

1. Make sure you have quality data by validating
and cleansing it.

2. Analyze and aggregate your data. If necessary,
engage your finance and sales colleagues in your data analysis.

3. Invest and allocate resources to conduct
marketing analytics. Without marketing analytics, you cannot develop the
necessary insights from the data.

Among the analytics you will want to perform are
customer-profitability analysis, customer-behavior analysis,
customer-lifetime-value analysis, customer-retention/customer-attrition
analysis, customer touch-point analysis, marketing-mix modeling, and
marketing-performance analysis.

4. Implement a data structure that unifies key data
among disparate systems and processes. Data silos inhibit insightful
information that can be leveraged to optimize marketing initiatives and
strategies.

5. Develop and apply a repeatable process to
continue to collect and analyze new data to measure results and support
continual improvement.

6. Measure and report on your progress and
success.

Now you are ready to use data to drive action—to make better
decisions regarding which marketing channels to pursue for which
customers, to justify your marketing investments, and to measure your
marketing performance.

For more information on Data Driven Marketing Campaigns, please visit http://www.noodlemedia.com or call 801-927-4046.