1.8 Turning Marketing Insights into Action

When the marketing campaign data are clear and certain advertisements or posts are performing better than other posts, it’s time to act. One all-too-common error that data-driven marketers make is thinking that they will be ready to “pull the trigger” on the marketing campaign “just as soon as they get the analytics from the next test.” This fear of moving forward and making mistakes is often called analysis paralysis, and it can strike marketers of all sizes and experience levels.

One way to avoid analysis paralysis is to stop viewing each marketing investment or campaign as somehow the best marketing decision you can make and instead think of each opportunity to invest in your marketing efforts as simply the next round of communications. Keeping the spend level small at these early phases of the campaign will lessen any potential losses and help you understand these versions of the marketing campaign as necessary investments in the complete campaign. This way, once the “numbers align” and you can calculate with near certainty that your marketing investments are producing a positive return on investment (ROI), it becomes a simple matter of turning up the spend levels to generate more leads, clicks, forms, likes, shares, engagements, inquiries, and sales.

If you think of marketing as a money-producing machine (or an “inquiry-producing” machine or a “whatever action you are trying to produce” making machine), it becomes easier to turn insights into action. Once you know the actual dollar value of a completed action or goal, it becomes a fairly simple math problem to solve. How much are you willing to spend to acquire a new customer? How much is each lead worth? How much revenue and profit will each extra (incremental) sale generate? What is the lifetime value of a customer for your business?

If I promised you that every marketing dollar you invested with my “2X ROI Marketing Machine” would generate two dollars in margin (or profit), how many one-dollar bills would you feed into it? If you said any number less than “all of the dollars I can find, one at a time,” why did you do so? Are you waiting around for a 3X ROI Marketing Machine? Do you think that sitting on the sidelines while others are making a profit is the “safer” decision? When you can answer the questions about the precise monetary value of each completed marketing action, you can safely budget your marketing spend to accomplish those goals.