“If you don’t understand how to use technology in marketing, there is no point for your existence,”
said Tim Kopp, former chief marketing officer of ExactTarget and current advisor and venture partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners. He was speaking as a panelist at the Indianapolis Business Journal Power Breakfast Series for Technology.
“Marketers are not doing a good job leveraging the data they have. They are doing a good job collecting it but not leveraging it.”
Whoa. Wait. What does this mean?
It means that marketing is increasingly scientific, and if you are not using company data (which you more than likely have at your disposal) to influence current marketing and brand strategies, then you are not doing your job as a marketer.
Not using the data to influence marketing means you’re guessing. Analyzing data allows you to use it to make decisions with a higher probability of success. Marketing professionals will say, “You need a new website, a new logo, you need to be doing content marketing, social media,” the list goes on. Here’s the question you should ask in response: “How do you know?”
There is only one way to figure out if these marketing tactics will work for you: It’s by analyzing the data to prove it. Numbers don’t lie. Don’t risk time, effort and money on a guess. Analyze the data, look for the trends, the low hanging fruit for easy wins, the messaging in the market that is working, the difference between how you want people to use your website and how they actually use it, what your audience wants to hear not what you want to write about, test campaigns before investing in them fully, measure everything, analyze everything.
The best part of this is that you probably have most of this data at your fingertips — for free — just waiting to be used. Google Analytics is a great place to start, when used correctly it will give you a ton of the data you need to understand the gaps and opportunities of your website and the majority of your marketing tactics.
Listen to Tim Kopp. Don’t guess about the future of your brand, it deserves better. Leverage technology to understand your marketing and brand strategies, to influence future marketing initiatives and to do what everyone wants marketing to do, increase sales.