How to be more data driven as a startup
As a startup or scaleup with fast burning limited cash it’s important that you know what impact your marketing spend is having on the bottom line. Even as a more established brand, marketing leadership still needs to demonstrate the impact their spend is having. So, the sooner you start thinking about you marketing data strategy and how it impacts the business the better. Avoid months and years of inconsistent data collection, misaligned teams and wasted marketing budget by getting your data ducks in a row as early as possible.
Implement a data strategy
There needs to be someone in your organisation who is data minded and can drive alignment and thinking across departments. This is usually driven from Marketing as they are the team that are collecting the initial data about your prospective and actual customers and clients. Although everyone benefits from a connected data strategy, your marketing team will be the ones to use it to optimise, analyse and drive growth on a day to day basis, so they need to be at the forefront.
Ensuring that the likes of Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Product and Engineering are aligned with what you are trying to do is going to prevent data silos and wasted effort as each team tries to do their own thing.
Audit and upgrade your tech stack
This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to rip up and throw out your entire analytics and CRM systems, but it does mean you at least need to audit them to work out what you are tracking, and if you can trust the data you have. Can you look back at your last few months of marketing and sales activity and say for sure what campaigns and content have driven the most business? If not, then as the marketing team is usually the main point of entry for customer data, putting in place the foundations for well structured campaigns and UTM tracking parameters across the marketing funnel is a great place to start.
Connect your tech and look beyond the top line metrics
It’s no good having the marketing team putting UTM parameters on everything if this info is not passed into your CRM system and conversion is not tracked through the funnel. Without that link, you will only ever be optimising on top level metrics such as clicks, visits, leads and cost per lead. They only tell half the story. You need to ensure your website or app is reliably collecting that tracking information in your CRM system so that you can start optimising activity based on the key metrics that matter to your business.
Depending on what those metrics are, being able to optimise marketing campaigns and channels on metrics further down the funnel is what is going help you drive real growth. Optimising a campaign or channel on the number of clicks, or the average time on site, is just going to have you chasing cheap non-converting traffic. Instead, a data driven marketing team should be using real measures of growth to optimise their activity. Focus on what is important to you, but optimising on metrics like Marketing/Sales Qualified Leads, Life Time Value, Conversion Rate, Customer Acquisition Cost and Return on Investment across the full marketing mix and broken down by channel and campaign can really increase the effectiveness of your marketing spend.
Continue to champion data connectivity throughout your business
Share your wins, your analysis and insights, your failures and what you have learned with everyone. Being a connected data driven business should be an ongoing commitment to continually uncover more ways you can use data to grow.
Need help on adopting a data driven approach in your marketing team or business?
