Data-Driven Growth Marketing: How High-Growth Companies Win

If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.

It sounds cliche, but it’s more true now than ever. We have access to so much data, and for businesses focused on growth, it’s impossible to know what’s working if you’re not tracking the metrics that matter.

Considering 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience, it’s time to use data effectively to know where to focus your efforts and ensure your customers are the focus of your campaigns.

This blog post will highlight the data you want to collect, analyze, and use to develop data-driven marketing strategies and campaigns that speak to your customers and drive growth in your business.

How High-Growth Companies Win With Data-Driven Growth Marketing

Put simply, data-driven marketing uses data to inform all marketing decisions and drive growth. In a world where 72% of customers will only engage with personalized messaging, you need to use data to ensure your marketing efforts strike the right chord with your customers.

Often, companies focus on hiring the right people, launching campaigns, and trying to sell their products before creating a winning go-to-market strategy. And a winning marketing strategy places the customer front and center.

The benefits of using data in your marketing efforts are clear:

• You’ll quickly determine the ROI of your campaigns.
• You’ll know where to attribute leads and sales throughout your campaigns.
• You can track and measure conversion rates and score leads.
• You can map out the entire buyer’s journey and leverage data to delight your customers.

There are plenty more.

If you don’t use data to your advantage, you’ll fall behind everyone else, commit random acts of marketing, and never know what’s working and what’s not.

The Benefits of Data-Driven Growth Marketing

If personalization is what the people want, you must give it to them. Buyers have the power these days, and 94% of consumers have discontinued communications with a company because of irrelevant messaging.

Your customers and prospects give you information about what they’re interested in and where they want to consume content from, and you can tailor your marketing efforts to meet them where they are with segmentation. 

Take the list below. You can split prospects and customers into segments and provide personalized outreach, engagement, and customer service.

Through buyer persona research and personalized content, you can also target well-defined market segments.

To inform marketing campaigns, you can predict customer behavior through a CRM, such as characteristics and engagement activity. Some platforms, like HubSpot, offer tools that apply characteristics or scoring attributes when a contact completes an action.

Another benefit of leveraging data is accelerating customer acquisition through email marketing, personalized content, and other channels. If you measure customer acquisition cost and length, you can find ways lower both.

With data, you can measure success, experiment without breaking the bank, and improve strategies in real-time.

Lastly, optimize your marketing ROI. Marketing can be costly without a strategy. Tracking data and pivoting when necessary is a good play for lean teams.

Example: Quantify the impact of marketing activities, not just on their ability to generate leads, but on the revenue converted through those leads.

Result: See where resources are spent on low-impact marketing activities and funnel spending to higher impact activities.

How Data-Driven Marketing Works

The value of data is clear. But to leverage it effectively, you need to determine the metrics that are important for you to track. Having a massive pool of data just for the sake of having a collection of data is a waste.

So how can you use data? Here are some ways to use data that focus on growth.

• Find value: Combine internal and external data to identify and prioritize growth opportunities across the buyer journey, from acquisition to retention.
• Plan a campaign: Start with a data-driven approach to prioritize growth opportunities, using the right resources and focusing on quality leads and ROI.
• Multiple touchpoints: Align prospects and customers across channels and touchpoints in the flywheel to drive conversion and maximize ROI.
• Support sales: Provide relevant and complete insights to sales teams and actively monitor progress across campaigns.
• Optimize: Gather and act upon insights - be willing to experiment, be agile, and improve the system over time.

What Does Data-Driven Marketing Involve?

If you’re looking for growth opportunities, here are some metrics you’ll want to focus on.

Setting goals, objectives, and KPIs

Remember, data for data’s sake is a waste of resources. To gather and leverage the correct data, you need to set goals and objectives and relevant KPIs.

Goals should be SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

For example, if you want to track qualified leads:

• KPI: Number of qualified leads
• SMART Goal: Increase the number of qualified leads by 20% in two months using email marketing.

SMART goals align your teams and establish benchmarks. Decide which metrics you want to measure and start implementing analysis straight away.

SEO and Keyword Research

Your content marketing team can use websites like SEMRush and Ahrefs to identify low-competition, high-traffic keywords. Why? So that content production is informed and not based on guesswork.

Good SEO optimizes your visibility and traffic. Think about how you search on Google. How often do you venture off of the first page? We’d guess rarely. The most relevant and valuable information is found in the first ten results.

The more thorough your keyword research, the more chances to create domain authority and bring organic traffic to your website.

Other metrics to consider: Keyword performance and rankings, traffic from organic searches, and inbound links.

Related read: SEO and Content Marketing: A Match Made In Heaven (And How to Do It Correctly)

Content Marketing (Blog and Content Creation)

Following on from SEO, once you know what your ideal clients are looking for, you can start to build a content library that speaks to their problems and challenges. As you build trust, you can work on engaging your clients with educational, informative, and entertaining content.

The data you can glean from your content offers includes user behavior (how users consume and engage with your content), social network discussions, and customer questions after consuming your content. Of course, leads might convert after reading or watching a piece of content, too!

You can measure Call-to-Action performance here, too. How effective are your CTAs at converting blog visitors to leads?

Revenue

There is no growth without revenue growth. To evaluate a marketing campaign, you need to determine its performance and impact on your bottom line.

Can you attribute profit and revenue growth to your marketing efforts? Calculating the return on marketing investment guides and informs business decisions and budgeting for future campaigns.

Of course, marketing isn’t the only thing that drives revenue. You’ll need to forecast sales and analyze monthly recurring revenue. You might also measure monthly account growth rate and customer retention. Several metrics affect revenue; the ones you track will depend on your business needs.

Email Marketing Metrics

Do you want to know how successful your email marketing campaigns are? There are sure-fire ways to track the performance of your campaigns and even how effective your segmentation is.

You’ll want to track bounce rates to uncover potential problems with your email list, delivery rates to make sure your emails are delivered to your customer’s inbox, and click-through rates to determine who clicked on relevant links in your emails.

Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation

Marketing automation helps to simplify your inbound marketing workflow. For example, you might trigger a series of emails when a lead converts on a landing page. You could automate onboarding for easy-to-use products.

Segmentation enables you to send targeted and relevant content to your leads and customers depending on their behaviors and preferences. Which pages do they visit? Which specific topics are they interested in? How often do they engage with you?

You can also track metrics like marketing qualified leads conversion rates, the sources MQLs come from, and the conversion rates of marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads.

There are many more metrics at your fingertips with a robust CRM platform. Not all of them will be useful to you, but you’re missing out on revenue and growth opportunities if you don’t leverage the data.

Examples of High-Growth Companies Using Data to Accelerate Growth

If you want examples of high-growth companies using data to accelerate growth, look no further than some of the most recognizable companies in the world (and another company we think is doing great things!).

Netflix

Netflix is the biggest online platform for streaming movies and TV shows, beating off competition from Amazon Prime Video and Hulu.

Their long-term retention rate is 72%, and they keep customers returning by using data to provide an intuitive and easy experience for their customers. They use data such as how their subscribers use their accounts. They collect data on:

• Movies and TV shows their subscribers watch.
• How they search for content.
• The date and time they watched a TV show or movie.
• The device used to watch it.

They also ask users to rate content and whether they want to see more of a specific type of movie or TV show. Each customer’s experience is personalized.

Amazon

Amazon has used data-driven growth marketing to become the largest online retailer globally. They grew their e-commerce business from $0.8 billion in 1999 to $280 billion in 2020.

Amazon did this by using data to improve its customer experience constantly. People wanted their products delivered faster, so they introduced Amazon Prime. They use predictive analytics for targeted marketing.

They analyze customers’ purchasing patterns from previously purchased items to items in their shopping carts and product reviews. They then encourage impulse purchases and further enhance the shopping experience.

Other examples include one-click purchasing for ease and book recommendations based on Kindle highlighting.

Monday

Monday.com is a work OS used by major brands like Uber and Coca-Cola. It recently surpassed $100 million in revenue.

Using their tool, BigBrain, Monday tracks and centralizes all of its data for one source of truth. They combine BigBrain with other tools like HubSpot, Google analytics, and Singular and use that data to inform all future marketing decisions.

As Rotem Shay, Head of User Acquisition and SEO, says: “We strongly believe in data-driven decisions for everything we do, from the day-to-day to planning future campaigns.”

Adopt a Data-Driven Approach Today

Data-driven marketing is essential in your efforts to keep up with your competitors. More importantly, it helps you to delight your customers with the personalization they expect.

You need to know how to interpret and leverage data to produce optimized and more cost-effective results. Instead of taking significant risks, you can track, measure, and experiment with marketing efforts backed by data to achieve profitable and scalable customer acquisition.

Lean Labs is an outsourced growth team, and we believe that data-driven marketing is a fundamental element of rapid growth. We’ve helped companies make over $100m in revenue and raise $90m in funding, and we always start with a data-driven strategy.

We specialize in B2B tech and SaaS brands, using a lean, data-oriented approach based on genuine partnership.