Have you tried to build a data driven culture in your marketing team, yet it still remains elusive?
Often the biggest obstacle to overcome is not technical but cultural. Rather than trying to implement new technologies or how you can inject data into your decision making, marketing leaders need to focus on fostering a culture of data and make finding and using data the norm for your team.
In this article we cover four strategies for helping you foster a data-driven culture in your marketing team. Let's get started!
A data-driven culture needs to start at the top and work its way down. You can’t expect your team to build this culture off their own backs. Your leadership needs to guide your team. You need to first enforce with managers and department leaders that they need to set the expectation that marketing decisions, whether they be on social media, email or any other medium, should be anchored in data.
Leaders need to lead by example. This means starting at the CMO level and running down through executives and senior leaders and then making data-driven decisions the norm in their teams.
The example set by the few at the top will catalyse the changes in the teams they run. And it is a simpler-to-implement strategy, to have the expectation initially set for a few (leaders) rather than try to force this on all employees at once. It will instead flow down naturally and require less resources to implement.
When choosing the analytics/data that you are observing, you need to pick with care and cunning.
There is an overwhelming amount of data out there, and your business likely has access to far more data that you can reasonably manage. A key strategy in implementing a data-driven culture is to not overwhelm teams with the analytics they need to measure and to pick the most impactful data to collect and analyse.
By choosing impactful metrics that are most relevant to your marketing efforts, you can quickly demonstrate to your team the difference that data-driven decision making has. When your team understands that they are using this data for a reason and seeing the outcomes, they will be more likely to continue in the behaviour of being data driven than if you were choosing low impact metrics or metrics where it would take a long time to see any noticeable results.
One of the big obstacles that marketers face is accessibility to data. According to Statista, 58% of marketers say their biggest challenge when using data is visibility.
Your marketers probably struggle to gain access to even some basic data because it is managed by other departments and kept in a walled garden.
Before trying to implement your data culture you must first ensure that data is accessible to your team. Speak with other department heads and ensure that your team has data access to the vital data that you will regularly need visibility of.
When your team is starved for data, a data-driven culture will never take root.
When you have multiple sources of data within a company, data consistency can be difficult. But without it disaster strikes. Bespoke metrics, preferred programming languages and other issues mean that unified data is impossible. When everyone is working in different styles you end up wasting countless hours trying to reconcile the small differences between how data was collected when they should have been universal to start with.
Having a consistent set of rules for how data is collected and analysed across your company will save essential time and make it easier for your team to find and understand the data they need to make decisions. It also means that ideas can more easily be shared. For example, your sales and marketing team may often have ideas that can be shared with one another but because the data always has to be translated, the frustration of completing this task means that it rarely happens and everyone is working in their own separate bubble.
Fostering a data driven culture is a challenge in marketing teams and by not being data-centric in your decision making, you will lag behind your competitors. The key to overcoming the issue does not involve technology or implementing new tools. But rather you need to change the culture around data. You need to make data- driven decision making the norm, and by implementing the above four strategies you can do exactly that.
See inspirations here:
Having a handy content curation tool to help you out can save you a lot of time and frustration with your strategy. Streams is a powerful marketing tool that can help you find trending content in your niche. Try it out today by signing up for a 14 day free trial!
