By Chris Bretschger
Though marketing has been focused on insights from data, it’s historically been guided by intuition. Data-driven strategies have served to validate assumptions, predict trends, and clarify ideas, but human intuition needs to be at the core of the process for more successful outcomes.
The Science of Data-Driven Marketing
Data analytics can be used to inform decisions, track performance, and predict trends of outcomes. With the wealth of data businesses have at their disposal in recent years, data has unlocked incredible opportunities to target marketing campaigns and make business decisions based on evidence and hard numbers, rather than personal assumptions.
Here’s how accurate data can support outcomes:
- Measurable results: Data can help you identify your audience and track the performance of marketing campaigns over time, including customer acquisition costs (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI).
- Reduced risk: Accurate data takes a lot of the guesswork out of marketing campaigns by showing you what works and what doesn’t – a crucial consideration if you’re working with a limited budget.
- Improved targeting: Market research data can reveal consumer preferences, behaviors, and demographic and psychographic information to build targeted messaging.
- Increased marketing efficiency: Data-driven marketing campaigns help you save on unsuccessful marketing campaigns, sparing your budget.
For example, A/B testing can be used to verify ad copy, images, CTA buttons, captions, and more, giving you insights into what’s most effective without guesswork. You can also analyze website traffic with tools like Google Analytics to see where customers may be dropping off and identify the cause.
How Does Intuition Improve Marketing?
There’s no question that data is important for understanding your audience and developing targeted marketing messaging and strategies, but at the end of the day, you’re still speaking to humans with your ads. If you let the data do all the work, you’re missing some of the emotions and nuances that guide consumer decisions.
Here’s how intuition informs marketing:
- Marketing trends and opportunities: Predictive analytics can help with upcoming trends, but intuition as a business owner and consumer yourself can help you identify subtle shifts in preferences, market climates, or untapped potential markets before they become the big trend. This can help you gain a competitive edge, especially with how rapid trends come and go.
- Customer insights: Data can tell you about a customer’s interests, age, income, location, and more, but it can’t go the extra step to interpret qualitative data quite like a human. Data can’t always unravel the nuance and context quite the same.
- Brand messaging: Creativity is a human process at its core. The creative aspects of your marketing campaigns, such as brand storytelling, customer success stories, and emotional hooks, require human emotional understanding and cultural sensitivity that data can’t match.
- Calculated risks: Data may be able to give you a heads up that there are market shifts or threats to your business, but not if no historical data exists. Intuition is your tool for navigating uncertainty, such as developing and launching a product that has no market equivalent.
Striking a Balance Between Data-Driven Insights and Human Intuition
A comprehensive marketing strategy should be data-informed, not data-driven. You can keep the human insights at the core of the process. Data helps with predictability, reliability, and validation, but your intuition is necessary for the emotional connections and creativity.
Start with Data
Data is the foundation of your campaigns. Gather relevant data to develop your marketing strategy, starting with broad data and narrowing it for relevance. Performance metrics, historical trends, and customer information are vital to shaping your campaign.
Tap into Your Intuition
Use your intuition to glean insights from the data and read between the lines. Look past the numbers with a creative eye to find hidden opportunities. This is especially important if you’re looking at incomplete or unclean data that may not be giving you a full picture.
Ask for Others’ Perspectives
Insights from multiple sources can be better than your intuition alone. Ask your team members for their interpretations and ideas to broaden your decision-making perspective. This type of collaboration, especially when it comes from people with diverse backgrounds and expertise, can reduce bias and help you understand if your assumptions are valid.
Test the Waters
If you’re experimenting with innovation, start small. Create campaigns on a small scale to evaluate performance and minimize risk before going all-in on massive campaigns. Best of all, you’ll gain some insights that can help with future campaigns.
Be Ready to Adapt
Part of your success with data is your willingness to pivot or adjust as the data reveals new insights. Staying rigid in your expectations can be just as detrimental as relying on assumptions alone. Make the most of your data and be prepared to let it guide you.
Examples of Intuition and Data Working Together
Not sure how this balance works in practice? Here are some examples:
- A travel brand may rely on data-proven promotions based on peak travel seasons to different destinations. However, the data can’t capture the essence of a destination and the emotional language that inspires travelers to book.
- Restaurant brands often use sales data to identify popular menu options and trending seasonal foods. It can’t capture the sensory experience of dining, however, or the feeling of sharing a meal with your friends or family.
- During a PR crisis, data can only go as far as giving you insights into customer sentiment. Your intuition helps you empathize with the public and create sensitive, genuine responses that show your brand cares about its impact.
Keep Intuition in the Process
Balancing evidence and hard numbers with creativity and empathy of human intuition can be challenging, but both approaches are essential for compelling marketing campaigns that inspire customer actions and drive continued innovation. You shouldn’t rely on your assumptions alone, but make sure you’re interpreting the data through a human lens.
Author Bio:
Chris Bretschger, Managing Partner at Bastion Agency, is a seasoned marketer with over 20 years of experience in integrated marketing. He has developed brand strategies, managed media campaigns, and built analytics tools for clients like Mazda, Adidas, Jenny Craig, and Kia. When not leading Bastion, Chris enjoys superyacht regatta racing on the open seas.
