Marketing Insights: Why You Need An Insights-Based Approach for Your Marketing

This is about decisions being made without evidence or insights, which has a degree of hope built in, whether it’s realised or not. This is particularly true if the ‘decision’ (not making a decision is considered a decision here) is to keep going about marketing, lead generation and sales the same way the business always has.

The fact is businesses need to change their approach. Markets have shifted rapidly as the needs of prospects have changed. Leaders need to ensure their business and teams can adapt to these changes to take advantage of the opportunities offered and defend against the threats created.

What’s the secret to accelerating business growth? A pragmatic and strategic approach of evidence gathering and targeting with specificity.

Get ready to measure impact with meaningful metrics

Practical insights can only be derived from data compiled by actively engaging in a target market and using content and marketing activities to test demand and engagement.

If this data doesn’t exist yet due to inactivity, or wasn’t captured from previous activity, then part of the objectives of any initial campaigns will be to start gathering data for future insights. This evidence-based and insights-fuelled approach will give you the information you need to get laser-targeted to spark growth.

What metrics are important?

Not having enough data available yet to formulate insights, while facing the opportunity of accessing endless amounts of data, is a real blocker.

Ultimately, the business metrics that matter most are Revenue, Profit and Cashflow.

For sales and marketers, it’s revenue and Return on Investment (ROI). From these we can reverse engineer what’s most important for lead gen.

Every business leader wants to know the actual impact of their marketing efforts. For this, the ultimate metric is ROI. While many business leaders theoretically understand that a solid marketing strategy ‘can’ have a direct impact to a company’s bottom line, it’s common for executives to believe that marketers aren’t focused enough on results which can be meaningfully shown to drive incremental customer demand.

When it comes to metrics that matter to your business growth, you should be aiming to understand marketing costs in the context of revenue, customer acquisition cost and client lifetime value. Reverse-engineering these metrics to know what data needs to be gathered is how you discover what is important.

Depending on where your business is at, this is often easier said than done. With so many variables and hurdles, even identifying the simplest of metrics can be enormously challenging.

So where do you start?

How to start getting laser-targeted

Start by defining your buyer personas. Buyer personas are a great way to start getting laser-targeted with your lead generation activities. Well-defined and realistic buyer personas enable you to segment your audiences and create stronger marketing campaigns by generating demand from the right prospects.

But, how do you start researching and creating these personas from scratch?

A buyer persona defined as “anyone who has a budget” will result in ambiguously vague messaging in your marketing content and will mean budgets deployed to reach new audiences will evaporate quickly as a result of trying to get the attention of too many different types of people. The proverbial net is cast too wide.