Stop Being A "Data Driven" Marketer (Part 1 of 3)

Posted by Rob Rose on May 04, 2009 at 02:14 AM PDT

So, last week I spoke at Chris Brogan's Inbound Marketing Summit (fantastic conference by the way).   The title of my talk was "Content Management - Bringing Sexy Back".  Okay, yeah, I was pandering a bit - but what do you expect - I was one of the last guys and I wanted to make sure there was at least a few butts in the seat.  

The theme of my talk was really about why I think it's time we should stop being a "data driven marketer".  I don't think it's hyperbole to say that there's been alot of noise about being "data driven" and "ROI" and "using analytics to drive our strategy".  There are even vendors that have centered their messaging around this idea.   And, today there's a great article in Ad Age by Jonathan Salem Baskin on this very topic.  

So, this post is the first of three (over the next three days) - where I'm hoping to at least humbly suggest that it's important to move from being "data-driven" to "content-driven".   In short, I'd like to bring some creativity back into the yin and yang balance of our strategy.

The danger of approaching online marketing from a purely statistical point of view is best summed up by baseball player Bobby Bragan. When commenting on those in baseball that rely too heavily on percentages, he said "say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable."

Being a purely data driven marketer has similar perils. It only allows you to measure what you have and not empower you to do anything about it. Data without insight are just statistics more dangerous for what they don't say, rather than what they do.

Rather, in today's online marketing landscape marketers need both the insight and the tools to help them bring prospects into the measurement in the first place. Marketers need a solution that helps create, manage and optimize their creative and deliver more and more success into their organization. In short, analytics delivers efficiency. Content, and the ability to optimize that content, delivers growth.

The importance of content, and the importance of managing it well, is starting to be recognized with the growth of landing page optimization, content segmentation strategies, and certainly web content management. In Maximize Business Results Online: How Web Content Management Technology is Transforming Digital Marketing, the Aberdeen Group found that 70% of all the businesses they interviewed placed content optimization and distribution of online content as a high priority in 2009.

However, managing content, without the ability to measure the success or failure of that content falls just as short as having the ability to measure without the ability to do anything about it.

Interactive marketers need a solution that accomplishes all of this. A Content Marketing hub should help the marketer manage their content no matter where it lives including their web sites, micro-sites, landing pages, search, email and social media. It should help them capture and manage conversions such as leads or other user generated data. And, finally it should provide for the ability to help optimize the content based on those measurements.

Solutions to accomplish select pieces of this exist today but are a bit like the quintessential committee charged with building a horse and ending up with a camel. No one solution offers these capabilities armed with both the platform and the insight to assist the online marketer who still feels overwhelmed. So, even the online marketer who wants to assemble this solution will be faced with a large, unwieldy technology project.

The idea for this type of online marketing hub technology has been floated for a few years but hasn't really been realized. The reason for this is because it is most often associated with a marketing resource management, marketing automation, or more recently site analytics solutions. Many of the MRM and Web analytics vendors extol the promise of success by putting data as the centerpiece as a data driven marketer. However this is a bit of a red herring because being a data driven marketer only makes sense if you have something of quality to measure. Where is the online marketing hub technology and service that both delivers data to the marketer, and simultaneously enables them to have insight and, most importantly, manage and optimize the content that drives success

In the next post (tomorrow), I'll explore why I think this idea of being a "content-driven" marketer is so important.

The theme of my talk was really about why I think it's time we should stop being a "data driven marketer".  I don't think it's hyperbole to say that there's been alot of noise about being "data driven" and "ROI" and "using analytics to drive our strategy".  There are even vendors that have centered their messaging around this idea.   And, today there's a great article in Ad Age by Jonathan Salem Baskin on this very topic.  

So, this post is the first of three (over the next three days) - where I'm hoping to at least humbly suggest that it's important to move from being "data-driven" to "content-driven".   In short, I'd like to bring some creativity back into the yin and yang balance of our strategy.

The danger of approaching online marketing from a purely statistical point of view is best summed up by baseball player Bobby Bragan. When commenting on those in baseball that rely too heavily on percentages, he said "say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable."

Being a purely data driven marketer has similar perils. It only allows you to measure what you have and not empower you to do anything about it. Data without insight are just statistics more dangerous for what they don't say, rather than what they do.

Rather, in today's online marketing landscape marketers need both the insight and the tools to help them bring prospects into the measurement in the first place. Marketers need a solution that helps create, manage and optimize their creative and deliver more and more success into their organization. In short, analytics delivers efficiency. Content, and the ability to optimize that content, delivers growth.

The importance of content, and the importance of managing it well, is starting to be recognized with the growth of landing page optimization, content segmentation strategies, and certainly web content management. In Maximize Business Results Online: How Web Content Management Technology is Transforming Digital Marketing, the Aberdeen Group found that 70% of all the businesses they interviewed placed content optimization and distribution of online content as a high priority in 2009.

However, managing content, without the ability to measure the success or failure of that content falls just as short as having the ability to measure without the ability to do anything about it.

Interactive marketers need a solution that accomplishes all of this. A Content Marketing hub should help the marketer manage their content no matter where it lives including their web sites, micro-sites, landing pages, search, email and social media. It should help them capture and manage conversions such as leads or other user generated data. And, finally it should provide for the ability to help optimize the content based on those measurements.

In the next post (tomorrow), I'll explore why I think this idea of being a "content-driven" marketer is so important.