Avoid These Data-Driven Marketing Mistakes
Marketing is becoming increasingly fragmented. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by all the marketing channels and tech out there?
Unless we have a clear path to purchase, we’ll struggle to identify every variable and touchpoint along the customer journey. For example, a customer could see a paid social ad, click the link, sign up for an email list, and buy a product. But, where else and how often have they been exposed to your brand before you could ever measure it? How do you know you’re not missing anything when your boss asks you to show the ROI of your campaign?
This leads to two fundamental problems: Marketers are either relying too heavily on martech data, or they’re not relying on it enough. Both are symptoms of marketing without a cohesive strategy.
It’s critical to “zoom out” and look at our marketing efforts as a whole, both upstream and downstream, and understand how they work together to contribute to the success of the business. Where data is concerned, marketers should be able to use insights to support their reasoning, inform marketing decisions and strategies, and compose a holistic view of performance.
Let’s explore the data-driven marketing dilemma and what you can do about it.
“Chase quality engagement, not just higher numbers”
The problem with martech and vanity metrics
Tableau defines vanity metrics as “metrics that make you look good to others but do not help you understand your own performance in a way that informs future strategies.”
Any data can become a vanity metric, from subscriber counts to media mentions to impressions. It’s all about the why behind your data.
At a recent Marketing Matters event in Lancaster, PA, we had attendees representing businesses of all industries and sizes. A common concern was that leadership wanted to see numbers that demonstrate the ROI of marketing. This puts marketers in a difficult position. They can’t secure the budget or support they need to build campaigns that they believe will contribute to business goals. The constant need for justification causes stress, wastes resources, and detracts from performance.
Companies either over-adopt—and often over-spend—on advertising to get quick and equally short-lived results, or they apply immense downward pressure on marketing teams to "prove" that what they're doing is working.
Marketers are left scrambling to get campaigns running and content published without a concrete strategy in order to show channel performance. So, they give their budget holders the only numbers they have access to—and typically, those numbers are vanity metrics.
For example, one of the most common marketing channels to fall victim to vanity metrics is social media.
Because leadership outside the marketing team doesn’t understand how social media translates to revenue, they scrutinize the team responsible. So, that team cobbles together a picture of “performance” using engagement metrics from social platforms. Leadership is satisfied with the numbers, because in business, we’re led to believe that performance is purely quantitative.
As a result, the team responsible for social media gets tunnel vision. After all, no one wants to lose their job. So, the majority of resources go into repeating the same efforts month over month, and quarter over quarter, to keep largely meaningless numbers growing and leadership appeased. The same is true for agency-client relationships.
Source: LANCMarketing.com
Last week, I posted about this on LinkedIn:
So many marketers struggle to prove the business value of what they're doing […] Gartner's Marketing Symposium keynote followed similar lines, and coined an important phrase: catalytic marketing. Put simply, marketers AND leadership need to prioritize quality experiences over the quantity of engagements.
And yes, that is the diametric opposite of how we're trained to think. In business, we’re led to believe that performance is purely quantitative. But it's time to put aside short-term growth at the expense of long-term value FOR and FROM customers.
If stakeholders are only concerned with the number of impressions, likes, comments, or shares your content gets, they are missing the bigger picture. This negative feedback loop stops marketing teams from being able to achieve real success.
Marketing should be approached scientifically
Do you consider yourself to be a creative person or a “math” person?
If you consider yourself to be either/or, please know that this is a self-limiting belief. Marketing is often positioned as a great career path for people who are highly creative. And it’s true, it is a great path. But, there is a place for creativity and science in marketing.
Think about whatever project or campaign you’re working on right now. Think about the steps you took to plan it. What inspired your idea? What is the goal of the project or campaign? Why do you think it benefits your business?
Now, let’s go a level deeper.
How did you estimate budget and resource requirements? How did you identify KPIs and success/failure thresholds? What does your project architecture look like? Which project management style do you use?
These are all important considerations that contribute to the success of a project or campaign.
Source: ScienceBuddies.org
While it may seem trite, the scientific method you learned in middle school science class can help you become a better marketer and speak to leadership and stakeholders in a way they understand.
This is because good marketing is problem solving. Some problems are larger, and many are smaller. But, the point remains.
If you can understand the challenges of the business, you can find marketing solutions. Marketing should be less about a gut feeling, HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion), or “the way things have always been done,” and more about a strategy to solve business problems, like not getting enough new leads or being outshone by a competitor in a key market.
Creating structure and using a scientific approach to marketing can help you communicate value to stakeholders. It can help you keep projects on track and better evaluate what’s working (or not working) and why.
Data is a critical piece of this puzzle, but only if you understand the role it plays and leverage it to tell a larger story.
How to use martech platforms confidently—and strategically
In 2020, COVID forced a digital transformation in marketing. The number of available martech platforms exploded, promising to help marketers generate revenue with extreme precision. And, while people are “back to normal,” many of the changes we saw in the industry are here to stay.
It’s true that data can be your best friend as a marketer. But, using too many martech platforms can also be your downfall.
The number of martech platforms increased 949% between 2014 and 2022, from 947 to 9,932. Between 2019 and 2022 alone, there was a 41% increase.
Source: Statisa
To become a truly strategic marketer in 2023, you should use SMART goal setting for your tech stack. You should also rethink your expectations and the way you incorporate martech across the board.
Joe Zappa, a colleague of mine who runs the content agency Sharp Pen Media, shared this on LinkedIn:
You cannot measure every single step in the customer journey, nor can you calculate with absolute certainty how much each touchpoint influenced their decision to buy
So, if you think you can only sell or buy marketing on the basis of calculable ROI, you are pursuing a metric that does not work for all that marketing entails
And the result will be you'll either 1) use tools that are at best approximations and pretend they're absolute truth or 2) only do the parts of marketing that can be more easily measured like paid ads
Maybe this is why SaaS companies spending $100M on paid ads only spend $100k/mo on content and PR services
Indeed, relying too heavily on data can obfuscate the “bigger picture” of your marketing performance across all channels. At the same time, refusing to incorporate more data-driven marketing can keep your organization trapped in the past.
Marketers are either relying on martech data too much or not enough.
Both issues are caused by a lack of strategy.
Consumer behavior is always changing, and it requires a level of agility, responsiveness, and risk-taking that many “old fashioned” companies simply aren’t willing to take.
Why does it matter? Well, because many companies are still approaching marketing like it’s 2014.
When I graduated from college that year, social media marketing was built on long-obsolete platforms like Flipboard, Vine, and Google+. The “internet of things” was a big topic, similar to the AI discourse of today. Trying to earn backlinks through PR was hardly on the radar. Location-based marketing was just emerging. For many companies, marketing campaigns were based on what they had always done—not based on how, when, and where consumers wanted to consume information, shop, or build relationships online.
Whether you’re an expert in a specific channel or a marketing generalist, martech platforms can help you with competitive research, the development of marketing hypotheses, tracking and reporting, and marketing automation. Companies who are most in-tune with what their customers and target audiences want, where they are active online, and what drives them to convert are the most successful.
When we talk about data, I don’t just mean the data on its own. A bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet won’t mean much to leadership and will land you back in vanity metrics territory. Instead, we can use data to tell stories and paint a clearer picture of the impact of marketing on the business overall.
For example, we can correlate our efforts to connect with a specific audience on social media with an increase in branded searches and organic traffic, within a specific timeframe. This is the scientific marketing mindset in action.
Final words
Marketing is a living thing. Marketing is also problem solving. And, data has an important role to play in our work.
It seems that there are two contrasting challenges facing companies regardless of industry: Companies who over-adopt, and companies who under-adopt. As Joe Zappa pointed out in his LinkedIn post, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into paid ads and related martech solutions can only take your marketing performance so far.
At the same time, not using data at all to inform your marketing strategies is putting you behind the eight-ball—and competitors who are more aggressively adopting a data-driven marketing approach.
It’s critical to stop, “zoom out,” and consider how all of your marketing efforts work together to propel the brand and the business forward.
