Good Marketing Is Data-Driven

For the past 14 years, I've helped businesses with digital marketing. Over these 14 years, I've watched many businesses implement marketing strategies without establishing a way to measure if the strategy is effective or not.

It's an easy mistake to make; especially when a business is focused on speed and growth. However, without a way to measure a strategy's effectiveness, businesses lock themselves into a cycle of guessing what they should do next.

To avoid this cycle, business owners should establish the foundation for tracking data immediately.

For example, if your website is your main marketing channel, you should be tracking what users are doing on your website (Google Analytics is free and standard in a lot of industries)

If cold-calling is your main form of marketing, you should be tracking metrics related to the strategy. For example, this could be as simple as tracking how many calls were made, how many people answered, and how many yes/no/maybe's were received in a spreadsheet (Google Sheets is free).

If social media is your primary focus, you should track each post, how much engagement it received, and what impact (if any) it had on your business (such as more website visits or leads).

The next step after starting a strategy will depend heavily on what your data says. If you don't have any data, you'll have to guess. If you have the data but don't understand it, you'll be able to hire someone to decipher what it says. From there, you'll have more information to help you decide the next steps.

Data is the backbone of marketing. Even though my decade-plus of experience allows me to make better guesses than someone with less experience, data is still necessary for consistently making good marketing decisions. There's no way around it.

So, if you're a business owner (or even an employee in a marketing role), make sure you have systems implemented that track data related to your marketing strategies.

Don't allow your livelihood and reputation to depend on non-educated guesses when you don't have to.