You Ask, I Answer: 2021 Data-Driven Marketing Strategy?

In today's episode, Magdalena asks, How have decision making processes changed as we look at marketing in 2021? What's your data-driven perspective? It's that time of year where we're doing 2021 planning and trying to do our forecasting and stuff. And uh as we plan for the year ahead, uh, we have to look at uh a bunch of different things in order to make any kind of decisions. And I'll tell you up front, it's gonna be harder than ever this year to do any really effective forecasting, no matter what business you're in, um, because of the macro environment.

Uh we are still, uh, as of the time of this recording, uh, not only in a global pandemic, but in a worsening one, and that is changing a lot of the environment that we operate in. That's just uh the the way things are right now. And so for the year ahead, we're gonna really need to look at three different classes of data. The first uh class of data is macro data. So this is macroeconomic data, societal data.

Uh the most obvious thing here would be uh, for example, with regard to the pandemic, the severity of it in terms of all the data around the pandemic is uh relevant and important. Um it will guide a lot of our decision making. Uh for example, uh as of yesterday, uh the United Kingdom announced uh a lockdown. Uh so uh they are changing how they're operating. Uh parts of Europe, uh Spain, etc.

have gone into lockdown. And so that changes the business environment, right? Uh depending on the phase you are in and your your regions reopening, uh, will dictate what kinds of business you can and can't do. If you represent, for example, uh restaurants, uh things, uh your lockdown is a very different operating environment than a a partially uh restricted environment. So we have to pay attention to that data.

We have to pay attention to uh other macroeconomic data, things like uh here in the United States we have uh the Federal Reserve Bank publishing data like household savings, uh unemployment uh and underemployment, uh household income, all these data points that give us a sense of what's happening in the broad world out there, because what's happening at the macro level obviously changes every business. In the beginning of the pandemic, it was very much uh B2C data that was heavily impacted, but now you know, eight, nine months in, uh, we're looking at the ripple effects of uh those challenges on the B2B supply chain. So every business without exception is being impacted in some way. The second thing we have to look at is audience behavioral data, and this helps us clue into what's going on with our target population. This is stuff like social media data.

How interactive is our audience, how engaged is our audience, not with us specifically, but just in general. Uh if you have already put together like a focus group of your ideal uh prospects and you're monitoring them on Twitter as a Twitter list, you should be looking at the ad activity level. Um, what are they talking about? Uh what are the topics that are top of mind? Again, as the time of this recording, we're about to head into uh an election in the United States.

It is one of the biggest topics of discussion right now. It's kind of drowning out everything. Um has been for for quite some time. So we need to keep that in mind. Um what is our audience searching for?

So search data is absolutely vital. If we don't have good access to search data uh to what our audiences are searching for, we're gonna be blind, right? Uh and again, we have to be very careful that we're using data that is current. Um then the third pool of data is our first party data. This is our web analytics, our marketing automation data, our CRM data.

And decision making processes for building a data-driven marketing strategy have to look at all three pools of data. Have to look for correlations at uh in that data, and then to the best of your uh ability, run any types of tests of causality to figure out if there are uh the changes that you're seeing in the larger data sets are reflected in the smaller data. So uh big changes in behavioral uh data and when it comes to organic search for your industry sector. Do you see that impacting your uh company's SEO? That's something you have to establish.

The challenge with all three sets of data is that we don't really have a baseline. Um we have not had a baseline since March of 2020. The op the environment we operate in is very fluid, it's very unpredictable. Um it is constantly changing, and it's constantly changing in ways that impact our businesses. There's always been you know a plethora of data.

There's always been a bunch of things happening in the world, but never to the this extent in modern times, in modern data-driven marketing times, have we had this much disruption all at once? And so we have to do two things. One, when it comes to 2121 planning, do not rely on data earlier than the pandemic start. Right? If you are looking at, you know, trying to forecast based on the last few years of data, it's gonna be really risky to do that.

Um, at least not without a lot of uh data science and statistical work to denoise some stuff and try and accommodate for changes. It's gonna be very difficult to use pre-pandemic data because fundamentally the world itself, the underlying structure has changed. Right. There's things that we don't do anymore. Even like if you were a lipstick company, guess what?

You've got people wearing masks. Not as many as I would like personally, but um, and that probably has impacted your your sales, right? Um so we cannot rely on data earlier than the pandemic. That world is gone and it's not coming back. Um even after the pandemic ends, uh, even after we have vaccines distributed and uh it's reasonably safe to be out and about again.

Um some things are not gonna change. Companies have discovered that you know having w at least some part of their workforce work from home is a cost savings. So uh telework uh got a big shot in the arm. Um conferences and events are not gonna be the same for a while. Um a lot of businesses have closed, a lot of businesses have opened, and so uh the world itself is that used to be prior to March of 2020, is isn't coming back.

So we have to acknowledge that. And we have to acknowledge that in our forecasting. The second thing we need to be doing is from a data-driven perspective on 2021, you've got to have really good near real time data uh and be doing near real time analysis. You've got to be looking at your analytics way more frequently than you have been. If your company culture has been the sort that you know runs quarterly reports, that is much too slow, much, much too slow.

Um your cadence should be at the pace of the uh I I personally think should be at the pace of whatever the top couple of steps in your uh marketing operations funnel are, right? If it's seven days from uh pro you know, from audience to prospect on your website or or wherever your systems are, that should be your monitoring interval, if not shorter, because things change and things are changing so fast that if you're not tracking and analyzing and watching your data, um, you risk you really risk missing things that could either be substantial advantages in terms of trends that you could uh contribute something meaningful to, or substantial risks. You know, the ground changes under you, and by the time your salespeople pick up the phone and say, hey marketing, you know, the the number of leads is really dropped off. It might be too late to make a change, right? It might be too late to pivot.

So you've got to be looking at your data at fast intervals. Use the tools that you have available to you. Use you know Google Analytics, use social media data, use search data to see how your audience is changing. Maybe even think about putting together like a near real-time dashboard, a daily dashboard, and just looking those for those those odd little drop-offs and things that tell you, hey, something's up, something's not right. So that's sort of my perspective on how our decision making has to change for data-driven marketing uh as we go into 2021.

Look at those three sorts of d sets of data. Don't rely on data before the pandemic, and uh really look at increasing the cadence, the frequency at which you analyze your data. If you got follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. We'll talk to you soon.

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