What is data-driven marketing and is it feasible for charities and non-profits?
When used effectively, data has the potential to transform how any organisation - commercial or non-profit - deploys its marketing budget. Rather than making a ‘best guess’ where spend should be used, data-driven marketing uses multiple data points (i.e. online & offline behaviour) to determine how marketing spend can be optimised.
The problem is that data-driven marketing isn’t easy. It’s difficult. It’s expensive. And doing it well relies on other difficult and expensive things, including:
Sharing data across the organisation, e.g. analytics, events, CRM etc
Investment in a data warehouse for the data points to feed into
Investment in people with the skills to clean, query and interpret data
Looking at these, it would be easy to conclude that it’s simply not feasible for non-profits or charities to even try. Caroline Fiennes wrote a really interesting piece talking about why many charities shouldn’t try to measure or evaluate their own impact and I think the four reasons she gives for impact more broadly can apply similarly to data-driven marketing.
So what are some more straightforward steps that charities and non-profits could take?
Recognise and recycle existing marketing data - you might already be doing this without too much thought. For example, choosing to target online ads across the entire UK and then using the performance geodata from the digital campaign to inform where to run out-of-home ads. Or using PPC keyword performance data to inform an SEO strategy.
Use information that’s already out there - other organisations might have already done the work and crunched data that you can apply to your campaigns. Whilst they’re likely to be quite top-level, they’re a good starting point. Facebook, Google and Twitter all have best practice recommendations based on analysing millions of ads.
And don’t discount internal (probably qual) data. Perhaps it’s more accurate to describe these as assumptions rather than data, but they can be a good starting point for a testing strategy.
Have a clear testing plan and record the results - think about messages, themes or audiences you might want to test. Importantly, though, keep a record of what you’re testing and the results (even if they’re inconclusive). I like to use a combination of Trello and slidedecks for this.
Be realistic when smaller campaigns or spend levels aren’t going to provide sufficient data - we want to be confident in the data we’re using and very small campaigns at low spend levels may not provide sufficient, high-quality data to rely on. That’s not to say ignore the data but perhaps look for the results to be replicated a couple of times before adopting the findings.
Finally, don’t give up! Data-driven marketing is hard, but starting small and iterating over time might start to give you the evidence you need to persuade your organisation to invest in some of the more difficult and expensive parts!
