Why do we need to make data-driven marketing decisions?

Data is the most valuable tool there is in marketing. Let’s discuss the reasons and the best practices to get the most value from data-driven marketing to make the best decisions and achieve optimal outcomes.
Data-based decision-making provides businesses with the necessary visibility to generate real-time insights and make accurate predictions to optimize their performance. They can generate expectations based on previous data and replicate the success of different marketing strategies that worked successfully before, making responsible business decisions for sustainable growth.
With the development of technology, there have never been greater opportunities to collect user behavior data at an enormous scale. Data is the necessary information businesses need to create new opportunities to optimize and personalize customer journeys and boost conversions while reducing churn.
The channels used 3 decades ago did not have a way to track user behavior. It was almost impossible to segment the audience and understand which audience was engaged in certain content. Now with data-driven marketing, we can determine what type of audience is interested in specific content, and therefore we can talk to the specific persona we are interested in. Furthermore, we know metrics valuable to our businesses, i.e. cost per click (CPC), cost per lead (CPL), customer acquisition cost (CAC), return on investment (ROI), etc.
The final goal of data-driven marketing is to gather data, analyze it, and see repeating trends that will facilitate the predictions to optimize the overall marketing performance and increase the ROI. In other words, data gives us a clear understanding of how much money are we spending and the results it brings us. This way, we can make smarter decisions in marketing budget allocation and marketing that will optimize the results we can achieve based on our budget.
One of the most popular analytics tools is Google Analytics which can help you to analyze the valuable metrics your business will need. In addition to the analytics tool, CRM is another highly useful tool to organize your customers in a clear database. It allows you to collect valuable data about each contact, or lead so you can implement the best suitable marketing strategy to target your contact list in the future.
Finally, the next step is to make data-driven marketing decisions by implementing the insights and optimizing the marketing efforts. You should be able to determine what is the optimal target audience. Which channels are the most effective? What type of content are your customers most likely to react to? What is the best ad format to engage your audience? How frequently your audience should be exposed to your content? How many touch points do we need for them to convert? By being able to answer the previous questions, you’ll have a better understanding of who is your ideal persona to target and what to tell them.
Collecting and analyzing data goes through various steps, sometimes it is good to have a lot of data, and sometimes it is not, since sometimes we collect data that is irrelevant to our business and it might derail us from our focus. But, as a general rule, the more data we collect the better it will be for us to analyze, optimize, and come up with significant insights that will impact our business in an extremely positive way, and will improve the performance results of all our marketing efforts.
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Thanks for reading!