One of the constant roadblocks holding marketers and business performance back is measuring marketing success.

“Research of 252 firms, capturing $53 billion of annual marketing spending, shows that many marketers struggle with marketing measurement; 55 percent of the marketing executives surveyed reported that their staff does not understand essential marketing metrics, and more than 80 percent of organisations do not use data-driven marketing.” Jeffery, Mark. Data-Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know.

This article focuses on strategies on how to overcome the top 5 obstacles for business to achieve data-driven marketing, as laid out in the book. Lets look at a summary of the top obstacles business face:

Obstacle 1: Getting started

Problem:

• We don’t know how.
• We don’t have the right metrics.
• The problem is not too little data; we have lots of data, but none of the data are useful.
• We don’t know where to start.

Solution:

What is the 20% of data that will give 80% of the value?

1. Develop a contact scoring model
2. Develop Surveys
3. Manage your customer data

Obstacle 2: Casualty

Problem:

• There are too many factors to consider in overlapping campaigns therefore defining cause and effect impossible.
• Awareness campaigns do not directly result in sales.

Solution:

Overcome this obstacle by using the right metrics and experiment to test marketing ideas.

1. Start with A/B testing
2. Watch a eLearning course on Performance insights
3. Add Email Insights to your reports and analytics

Obstacle 3: Lack of Data

Problem:

• We don’t know who our customers are.

Solution:

Develop activities to learn more about customers and their behaviours.

1. Create a Progressive forms
2. Watch an eLearning course on web tracking
3. Develop Surveys
4. Develop a contact scoring model

Download our Ultimate Guide to Lead Scoring to get insight on how it works and how it can help your business.

Obstacle 4: Resources and Tools

Problem:

• We don’t have the time and/or it cost too much.
• We don’t have the tools and/or systems to support data-driven marketing.
• We are marketers and can’t communicate with information technology (IT) people.

Solution:

Data-driven marketing technology is too important to leave to the technologists

1. Learn about Universal Behavior Exchange
2. Develop nurture programs and automations
3. Get IT out of the way and build your own Landing Pages

Obstacle 5: People and Change

Problem:

• Our incentives are all for marketing activity, not results.
• We do not have a culture of measurement.
• We don’t have the skills for data-driven marketing.
• Marketing is creative: imposing metrics and process will kill creativity and innovation.

Solution:

1. Reward results, not marketing activity—align measurement with incentives for change of the marketing organisation and train employees to use the new tools and approaches.
2. Senior executive leadership is needed for cultural change across a large marketing organisation.
3. Develop programs and scoring models for staff incentives.

In summary, the main reason for the obstacles of marketing measurement is that the marketer needs to translate the marketing strategy into the infrastructure and culture of the business. From the business intelligence to the marketing communications and personalisation to CRM and operational systems.Once all the systems are integrated, a single customer view is transparent and actionable data is at the marketer’s fingertips.

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The roadmap to data-driven marketing starts with the assessment of your current situation and defining the metrics you will use for measurements.  You will then decide on the activities that will give the highest impact at the lowest effort and cost.

From this, finalise your quick wins and development of tools for repeatability, and then add a flexible review process to act on the results and change course if need be. As with all marketing, it's about the bottom line.

‍Results talk, and data-driven marketing activities and measurement will be the 20% of effort that gives 80% of the value for justifying future investments. Let's get started today!