In 2009, Google's Chief Economist Dr. Hal R. Varian predicted the growing importance of data skill. Varian stated, “The ability to take data—to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—is going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.”

Yet even as data has become ubiquitous, companies and the people that power them still struggle to produce strategic results. Even in 2023—the year of AI everything—many marketing organizations still find themselves wrestling with how to effectively incorporate data into everything they do. In many cases, we continue to be data rich and information poor.

Data plays a crucial role in effective marketing by providing insights, inspiration and information that can guide strategic decision making, improve targeting and personalization and measure the success of marketing efforts. It helps marketers understand customer behaviour, preferences and trends, allowing us to tailor our messages and campaigns to maximize impact.

Today, when we think of data, we often think about using it to drive marketing decisions. But this is a limiting view of data, particularly when looking at it through the lens of Humanology.

In order to bring a true Humanology mindset to our work, we need to use data more broadly.

There are 3 simple ways to think about this. We can be:

Data Driven – we use the data as it is to make decisions.
Data Informed – we interpret the data while acknowledging and understanding its limitations.
Data Inspired – we imagine possibilities based on the interpretation of the data.

So which is best? There is no one right answer. Ultimately, the right approach depends on the goals you are trying to achieve and the type of data that you have available. Naturally, as your business evolves, so too will your approach to data. Let’s dig in!

What is a Data-Driven approach?

Data-driven marketing relies on collecting, analyzing and using data to determine marketing strategies and drive targeting, personalization, optimization and measurement. It involves using various data sources, such as customer demographics, purchase history, website interactions, social media activity and more, to gain a deep understanding of customers and deliver relevant and personalized experiences.

Example: An online retailer uses data analytics to segment its customers based on demographic data, past purchase behaviour and website interactions. The retailer then creates personalized email campaigns with targeted product recommendations for each customer segment. It continuously analyzes the campaign performance metrics, refines the targeting and messaging based on the data and iterates for better results.

If you are data driven, you have the exact data you need to make a decision—and data has the final say.

When you are driven by data, you agree with this statement: “The data will tell you exactly the answer you need to know in terms of what to do next.” For effective examples of data-driven marketing, think performance digital marketing, A/B testing and continuous optimization and dynamic website content.

What is a Data-Informed approach?

Data-informed marketing uses data analysis and insights to guide marketing strategies, decisions and optimization. It involves using data as a valuable resource to gain a deeper understanding of customers, their behaviours, preferences and market dynamics. Marketers rely on data to inform and validate their decisions, improving the effectiveness and efficiency of their marketing efforts.

Being data informed means that data is one of the many components in the decision-making process. It means that we are aware of the current performance and why the campaign (or product) is performing the way it is in order to make optimizations to our strategies. In addition to data, we also take other sources of information like past experience, intuition, judgment and insight. This allows decision makers to have a more holistic understanding of the business and make better decisions.

Example: An e-commerce company analyzes customer purchase data and identifies that a significant portion of its customers prefers to shop on mobile devices. As a result, the company prioritizes optimizing its website and user experience for mobile devices, ensuring seamless mobile shopping and a responsive design that caters to customers' preferences.

If you’re looking to innovate, be data informed. It’s the best of both worlds.

A data-informed approach is best when you’re working on a complex project that requires a number of inputs or one that requires creativity. Think customer segmentation, content optimization, marketing channel attribution and personalized messaging.

For instance, a data-informed approach is best for designing digital experiences. Apart from data, you need feedback from your users, your personal experience, stakeholder input and more. See how we’ve applied this process through some of our recent DX work.

What is a Data-Inspired approach?

Data-inspired marketing goes beyond using data to inform decisions and strategies. It involves actively seeking insights and inspiration from data to drive innovative and creative marketing concepts. With this approach, marketers use data as a catalyst for generating new ideas, identifying emerging trends, generating unconventional strategies and creating impactful campaigns.

A data-inspired approach is exploratory, with no expectations on outcomes. The analysis produced by this approach draws on intuition and inference based on data from different sources. The data will not have a definite direction about your design or strategy, but it does offer observed trends that can be used as springboards for ideation and innovation.

Example: A beverage company analyzes social media data and discovers a rising trend of consumers looking for healthy and natural drinks. Inspired by this insight, the company creates a new line of all-natural, organic beverages and develops a marketing campaign that highlights the health benefits and unique flavours of its products.

Data inspired is the ideal approach to use when developing new products, new creative ideas and new concepts.

Trendspotting uses a data-inspired approach to analyze data from various sources, such as social media, search trends or industry reports, to put the story together and identify emerging trends. For other examples of data-inspired marketing, think user-generated content campaigns, personalization through predictive analytics and real-time campaigns.

Show me how this works IRL.

Clearly, we can use data in a number of ways to create and implement more effective marketing. But do we have to choose just one? The answer is no. We can use all the approaches in the same project or campaign. The key is to be clear on why we are using the data and how we hope to use it. A strong example of “Humanology in action” and the effective use of all three data approaches (data inspired, data driven and data informed) is the work that we recently completed for our client EZRA, a digital coaching platform.

You likely know that the HR landscape has changed dramatically in the past few years, with a shift in power, team morale and what employees are looking to get out of their work life. Human Resource Managers need new strategies and approaches to attract, engage and retain a rapidly evolving workforce. Enter EZRA online coaching, a personalized, measurable and scalable approach to coaching.

The challenge we needed to help HR managers with was how to sell this offering up to the C-suite through a large and diverse buying committee.

Data-informed research told us that a key point of differentiation for them was, with EZRA, client progress is measurable. This fact, combined with the data-inspired insight that high performers are addicted to “closing their rings,” led us to create the “measure of success campaign” as a way to depict the success metrics the EZRA coaching product offers.

We also used a data-drivenapproach to adjust and optimize based on who we were targeting: HR managers, business leaders or the C-suite. This allowed us to test the effectiveness of leading with emotion-driven benefits like happiness versus business-driven benefits like overall productivity.

Continuous testing allows us to quickly learn what messaging works with whom and adjust in real time so that we’re delivering the right ads, right visuals and right messaging to each audience.

So, how do I make my marketing more data inspired, data informed and data driven starting today?

Here are some actionable steps you can take:

Conduct a data audit: Identify the data you currently collect, the platforms and tools you use for data tracking and measurement and any gaps or limitations in your data collection processes. This will help you understand the current state of your data capabilities and identify areas for improvement.
Enhance your data tracking and analytics:If you haven't already, implement GA4 or other web analytics platforms to track website traffic, user behaviour and conversion metrics. Integrate your website with marketing automation or customer relationship management (CRM) systems to collect and centralize customer data.
Define key performance indicators (KPIs): Clearly define the KPIs that align with your marketing objectives. Setting specific KPIs will enable you to measure the impact of your marketing activities and make decisions based on the results.
Find the moments to use data to empower success. And, most importantly, train yourself to actively look for opportunities to incorporate data into your decision-making process and consciously determine if you can use data to inspire, inform or drive your decision making.

This will set a strong foundation for a data-inspired, data-informed and data-driven approach to marketing.

Thoughts? Opinions? Suggestions? Please share.

Not 1 but 3 Ways to Use Data to your Advantage

More Humanology Insights

Never miss a Humanology Insights post