9 Essential Steps to Building a Data-Driven Marketing Team

As a B2B marketing leader, your work should be anchored to the bottom line.

In other words, you're either directly or indirectly influencing your company's revenue. Generally speaking, this involves creating and capturing demand.

Not everything you do will directly impact your company's revenue. However, everything you do should influence it in some shape, way, or form, either today or tomorrow.

Moreover, as a marketing leader, you need to equip your team members to think about how their work influences the bottom line as well. This doesn't happen by accident or after just one meeting. It requires building a data-driven marketing team.

In this post, I'm going to share nine steps you can take to build a data-driven team, including:

1. Clarify your North Star Metric
2. Clarify your marketing team member goals
3. Make your numbers transparent
4. Review the numbers weekly as a team
5. Review the numbers with your direct reports
6. Establish a culture of experimentation
7. Make data-informed decisions
8. Incorporate feedback loops
9. Align marketing data with sales and customer service

Before getting into this, let me share two important notes.

2 important notes before getting started

Before diving into the details, I'd like to share two important notes:

1. Understand what it takes to empower your marketing team
2. Recognize the difference between vanity and actionable metrics

Allow me to explain.

1. Understand what it takes to empower your marketing team

I'm an advocate for creating a data-informed marketing team and understanding marketing data.

But pump the brakes before you dive head first in this direction. 

The first thing you need to do is to fundamentally understand how to unleash your marketing team. This includes data. But data won’t inspire anyone to run through a wall in pursuit of their best work and achieving their goals.

I recommend reading 7 Keys to Empowering Your Marketing Team for a clearer picture.

2. Recognize the difference between vanity and actionable metrics

Not all data is created equal. 

It's vital to distinguish between metrics that merely look impressive (vanity metrics) and metrics that genuinely facilitate meaningful change (actionable metrics).

To put it plainly:

In the realm of marketing, likes, comments, and website visits are of minimal significance unless they strategically contribute to or generate revenue.

A straightforward method I utilize to distinguish between vanity and actionable metrics involves differentiating between lead and lag metrics:

• Lag metrics represent achieved goals.
• Lead metrics signify activities directed towards achieving goals.

For instance, a common goal in marketing might be a specific Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) target. This is your lag metric, which you would report at the week's or month's end.

Conversely, lead metrics outline the strategies and tactics used to achieve your goals. These range from paid media to demand generation and everything else in between. The essence of monitoring lead metrics is ensuring that you're tracking and managing the right metrics, which either directly or indirectly influence your team's objectives.

With this foundational knowledge, you're primed to build a data-driven marketing team.

1. Clarify your North Star Metric

What is your marketing team primarily responsible for?

This is called your North Star Metric.

It’s the primary goal you and your team aim to achieve. 

Is it …

• Marketing Qualified Leads?
• Sales Qualified Leads?
• Something else?

Whatever it is, nail it down first. 

If you haven’t set this up yet, take the initiative. 

After you’ve laid it out, invite your team members to discuss their goals and get their approval. 

This way, they're clear on their responsibilities and understand how their work influences the bigger picture.

2. Clarify your marketing team member goals

At this step, ensure your individual marketing team members have clarified goals too. 

Now, for their goals, it will be dependent upon their role and responsibility. What is more, it will also need to be something tied directly to the North Star Metric. In other words, their work needs to be directly tied into influencing your team’s overall goal.

Get this clarified. 

If you haven’t done this yet, take the lead in putting it together. Afterward, invite your team members to discuss their goal, and get them to sign off on it. 

This way, they know what they are responsible for and how they’ll need to adapt their work in order to accomplish their goals. 

3. Make your numbers transparent

Your team and individual goals should be transparent and easily accessible.

Everyone on your team should be able to see the team’s overall performance. Make this information available to your leadership and other departments as well.

By doing so, you can anticipate challenges and capitalize on unexpected opportunities, ensuring you're always in tune with performance indicators.

You can achieve transparency in your team by using:

1. Analytics Platform
2. Spreadsheet

For Analytics Platforms, I’ve had a great experience with Klipfolio. It allows you to consolidate data from various sources and monitor your metrics centrally. It’s shareable with your team and others in your company too.

Alternatively, you can use a Spreadsheet to collect data from different platforms. With tools like Supermetrics, a lot of this process can be automated.

There’s no strict right or wrong method here.

Choose what's best for your marketing team.

4. Review the numbers weekly as a team

At least once a week, review both your team and individual metrics.

The aim of this meeting is to ensure you're on track as a team and individually. It also reinforces the data-driven approach within your marketing team.

In these meetings, focus on the key metrics that individual team members are accountable for, so you don’t drown in data.

5. Review the numbers with your direct reports

Each week, dive deeper into the data with your direct reports.

For instance, during my stint at PhoneBurner, I’d meet with team members to explore their performance more closely. The objective isn’t to play the blame game but to study the tactics, strategies, and metrics driving their goals.

The goal of these sit-downs is to empower team members, provide support, and identify if things are going off track or potential opportunities to pursue.

After all, why wait for a quarterly review when you can give real-time feedback or praise?

6. Establish a culture of experimentation 

Your marketing work is ever-evolving.

You can’t just devise a strategy or kick off a campaign and then take a break.

Life and business are always changing. 

Yesterday’s strategies might not cut it today, let alone tomorrow.

That’s why fostering a culture where team members can experiment, assess results, and iterate is essential for a data-driven marketing squad.

This mindset prioritizes continuous improvement, data analysis, and future decisions based on data insights.

While at PhoneBurner, we aimed to initiate at least five A/B tests every quarter. From ads to landing page headlines and new campaigns, the team became skilled at testing and then reviewing data.

If testing is new territory for you, start simple. Use something like the ICE Framework to identify new test ideas, and aim for one and gradually build processes to facilitate ongoing improvements.

7. Make data-informed decisions

In marketing, you'll constantly be bombarded with fresh ideas.

Whether from your team, leadership, or other departments, someone will always pitch something new.

And that's fine. I've realized it's part of the marketing gig.

But here’s the thing:

Always make data-informed decisions.

If you're considering a new marketing angle or strategy, ask: What data supports this decision?

Need to decline someone's suggestion? Be ready with the data.

If data doesn't back an idea, you might need to reconsider an idea or find other ways to justify it.

(Yes, there are times you need to go with your gut instincts. But even then, your instincts should be fed with data.)

8. Incorporate feedback loops

Being data-driven means nothing if you don't act on feedback.

What's the data telling you?

What’s on track? What needs tweaking?

This feedback will naturally emerge in your reviews. So, always be ready to adjust strategies based on results.

9 Align marketing data with sales and customer service 

In B2B SaaS, marketing isn’t an island.

To truly be data-driven, it’s not just about your team's efforts.

Your data should flow through the entire marketing and sales funnel.

This means integrating your work with all customer-facing departments.

This holistic approach provides a complete view of the customer journey, letting you see how marketing initiatives directly influence sales and customer satisfaction.

It’s time to build a data-driven marketing team

If this is new to you, I'd suggest not starting with everything all at once.

Instead, begin by establishing your team's North Star Metric and your team members' individual goals. Then, review these weekly as a team and individually. These four steps will put you and your team well on the way to building a data-driven marketing team.