Data-Driven Marketing [Research Insights For 2023 Planning]
Data-Driven Marketing
[Research Insights For 2023 Planning]
Having the correct data to prove ROI and make strategic marketing decisions is critical, particularly during economic downturns. Marketers state that they don’t have the accurate data points to accomplish this effectively. The data and decision-making process are growing apart.
When marketers rely solely on instinct, budgets are not maximized and their marketing efforts have little value. When this occurs, a company's marketing department may not survive.
Here are the key research insights about marketers who reported their challenges facing today, where they plan to allocate their budgets in 2023, and what they can do to begin closing their data gaps.
25 Key Insights from The State of Data-Driven Marketing Report
[Survey and Research by CallTrackingMetrics and Industry Dive]
1. Marketer’s Top Data Challenges:
Lack of Confidence: Most marketers continue relying on outdated KPIs to gauge business success, leading to a gap in confidence when communicating ROI to senior leadership.
Can’t link to revenue: Most marketers feel they have enough data to sufficiently perform their jobs, yet they remain primarily concerned about connecting their performance to revenue and company-level results.
Need to optimize: Although most marketers expect their budgets to increase in 2023, fewer than half anticipate directing spend to campaign optimization and marketing attribution tools like conversation analytics and call tracking.
2. Research found that most marketing decisions are data-driven (64%), a significant proportion of respondents still reported achieving marketing attribution and ROI as their top challenge in 2022.
3. Our data shows that fewer than half (37%) expect to focus any budget on advanced measurement activities like conversation analytics or call tracking by 2023.
4. Research also indicates that many marketers have identified a data gap in their organization. More than one-fourth of respondents (32%) reported operating with insufficient data.
5. Identifying a data gap is the first step to efficiently remediating insufficient ROI — and marketing departments need thorough hasty remediation.
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6. More than half of all marketing departments (51%) anticipate increasing their digital marketing budget in 2023. With this level of spend on the line, organizations must identify and address data gaps now before squandering funding.
7. Data shows that most marketers report on KPIs weekly (39.5%), monthly (27.6%), or daily (21.9%). To create powerful, actionable insights, digital marketers should seek valuable data that helps them achieve better ROI and tracks with organization-wide goals.
8. The frequency of KPI reporting suggests that success metrics are crucial to departmental oversight, and yet almost 50% of marketing professionals cannot report on conversion quality.
9. Google Analytics ranked first among respondents as the preferred metric-tracking tool (compared to customer relationship managers (CRMs), data visualization tools, spreadsheets, and custom reporting methods).
10. Just 32.4% and 35.2% of marketers typically report on more robust success metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV) and cost per lead (CPL), respectively.
11. Only 30% of marketing professionals feel they always have enough data to answer executive leadership’s questions.
12. Data disconnect is a problem because the C-suite expects definitive answers beyond flimsy data or “I don’t knows.” Many marketers need more sophisticated tools that can identify ROI attributed to their efforts.
13. Marketing professionals report that only 64% of their team’s decisions are “data-backed.” That means 36% of marketing decisions—even among teams with plenty of data—are made based on instincts and assumptions.
These uninformed decisions don’t move the needle or maximize marketing efforts.
14. While 38% of marketing professionals don’t have enough data that ties back to revenue, 32% simply don’t have enough data to properly execute their roles.
15. 40% of respondents ranked marketing attribution and ROI as their top marketing challenge.
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16. Data indicates that 51% of all marketers plan to increase their overall digital marketing budgets in 2023, with 22% significantly increasing these budgets.
The focus of those investments tends to include social media, content marketing, SEO, and pay-per-click advertising.
17. Many marketers’ budget allocation decisions aren’t necessarily tied to solid data and sometimes rely on irrelevant or insignificant metrics. Others rely purely on instinct alone.
Marketers acting on intuition will inevitably scale revenue-losing initiatives.
18. Marketers’ budgetary preferences suggest that operational efficiency remains a priority.
19. 58% of marketing professionals monitor five or more KPI-tracking tools per week.
20. Marketing teams plan to focus budgets on content marketing (40%), pay-per-click advertising (32%), and SEO (35%) in 2023.
21. Only 19% of respondents will invest in call tracking tools and only 17% in conversion analytics next year [2023].
22. Survey confirms, data volume doesn’t equate to data quality.
23. While most marketers collect plenty of customer data, many struggles to identify the valuable insights that fuel business results. Insightful data is the difference between good marketers and great marketers.
24. Great marketers know exactly what’s driving sales. Instead of depending on baseline performance metrics generated by website activity, these marketers invest in robust marketing attribution and automation tools designed to produce actionable accurate data. These tools enable good marketers to become great.
25. Great marketers track meaningful KPIs because their tools can measure every conversion and pinpoint revenue directly attributed to their efforts.
Great marketers use their tools to facilitate insight-driven reporting that proves their ROI.
To Conclude:
Here are the 5 Steps to Data-Driven Marketing Success:
1. Align sales and marketing teams:
[Focus - Give marketing and sales teams complete visibility into the same data to foster transparency and alignment].
2. Create a holistic campaign measurement strategy:
[Focus - Setup UTM parameters. Identify and evaluate current KPIs on how effectively they measure advertising campaign performance.
Depending on available tools, choose more relevant KPIs that gauge marketing attribution and ROI].
3. Automate reporting:
[Focus - Use human marketing expertise to analyze the impact of channels and content and identify patterns that lead to business-critical insights].
4. Audit data:
[Focus - Scour reports for critical data gaps and unanswered questions. Identify the tools teams currently use — or might need — to investigate, report on and communicate marketing attribution and ROI].
5. Invest in marketing attribution tools that increase data value:
[Focus - Fill data gaps with marketing attribution tools like conversion analytics and call tracking designed to provide visibility into revenue, conversions, and overall ROI.
Adopt tools that capture actionable data, trends, and indicators. Avoid implementing multiple tools that can produce inconsistencies, incompatible definitions, and differing interpretations].
It is my hope that these insights might be useful for your future planning in 2023, and if you would like to read CallTrackingMetrics’s complete report, you may do so.
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