Authored by: Marcela Quiros Lepiz, Marketing Data Scientist at Covalent Bonds
Having worked in data science for over six years now, I’m increasingly seeing data become a critical part of the marketing mix and its true value is becoming more recognised.
My speciality is building powerful data models that integrate data from multiple sources and create an analysis framework to effectively answer strategic marketing questions – this has seen me work with many marketers over the years.
Here are the three things I wish every marketer knew before setting out on a data-driven marketing campaign:
- Involve us from day dot
For many marketers, the temptation can be to come up with an elaborate marketing campaign and then get to the end of the concept stage and at that point reach out to a data scientist to understand how it can be measured.
While they will most likely (try to) find you a solution, data can’t be collected retrospectively. The best way to get meaningful metrics that provide true value and learnings is to involve a data scientist from day one – as marketers, you look at ‘what you want to see’ and we look at ‘what can we actually see’ and working together on this is where success lies.
- Know your goals/audience/KPIs
You don’t need to have everything in place when you come to a data scientist. All you need to know, and be very clear about, is;
- What are you working towards?
- How are you expecting your customers to interact with you/your website/ your comms?
- What is the desired customer behaviour?
Knowing your goals and KPIs, even if you don’t know how you’d measure that, is arguably the most important element of a successful data-driven marketing strategy. If you can bring the above to a data scientist then they can guide you on the rest!
- Extraction & Storage – make room in the budget!
Often in a marketing budget data systems either aren’t in the budgeting equation at all or are bottom of the pile with the smallest budget. Data storage and data extraction is expensive, so recognizing that the quality of your data storage system will hugely impact the quality, and therefore value, of your actual data output will serve you extremely well in the long run.
Knowing and acting on these three things before embarking on a data-driven marketing programme could be the difference between a mediocre campaign and one that is transformative, informative and powerful for your brand and its customers.
If you were to take away one thing from this, in the words of our CEO “Don’t keep data and marketing separate…be friends from the beginning.” This really is the foundation to a successful marketing campaign and an ethos we live by at Covalent Bonds.
These are just a handful of pointers I could share with you, learn more in my Talk Life Science Marketing podcast episode, here.
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