The Essential Marketing Tripod: Strategy, Tactics, and Data

Standing Up Effective Marketing Programs Requires Three Strong Legs (Not Just Two)

It’s a concept straight out of an undergraduate marketing course: Marketers need to understand the difference between marketing strategy and tactics. For example, an email drip campaign is a tactic, not a strategy. Improving inbound traffic is a strategy that would be supported by an email campaign. Although they’re distinct concepts, strategies and tactics go hand in hand and are necessary to achieve marketing goals. But if you were to consider them the two main pillars of marketing, you’d still be missing a third, critical support your marketing program needs to stand upright. 

That essential third piece is data. Marketers generally have a wealth of data available to help them understand customers and prospects. Depending on whether the targeted audiences are businesses or consumers, types of this data may vary; consumer data may include demographics, interests, and behaviors, while business data may encompass company and industry information, financials, and corporate linkages. Both B2B and B2C marketers leverage sales data, campaign performance metrics, and digital signals such as social media activity. And sometimes B2B marketers may also find consumer data to be valuable for precise targeting of high-propensity audience segments.

With so much available data, many marketing teams want to think of themselves as “data-driven.” But while data should be at the center of data-driven marketing, it sometimes ends up taking a back seat to strategies and tactics — which significantly increases the risk of missed growth opportunities and leads that are unlikely to close. 

How Data Powers Marketing Strategies and Tactics

If strategies provide the roadmap for the marketing function, and tactics are the vehicles for following that roadmap, then data is the fuel that enables the vehicles to start up and run. And if we extend that fuel metaphor: the wrong fuel, or not enough fuel, or poor-quality fuel, will cause your marketing program to run in the wrong direction, toward the wrong destination, or stall out before it has a chance to run at all.

Data provides insights into customer behavior and preferences, helping marketers target specific segments and personas. Those insights can be related to the timing of campaigns, or which messages and value propositions have gotten the strongest reception; ultimately, they help to maximize the impact of marketing programs.

Marketers also need their data to be able to tell them whether they’re using the right channels to execute against the right audience segments. In fact, the data is the essential prerequisite to segmentation, list building, and other processes such as personalization of email campaigns. Paid media is another example where data determines engagement with the most receptive audiences, at times and places where they would be most responsive to marketing messages and content.  

Marketing data doesn’t just provide critical information about who should be targeted. It also lets marketers see how its content and messages have resonated with audiences, sharpening the focus on the most effective programs and campaigns. This in turn helps marketers to craft more persuasive stories and drive future strategies for engaging with their targets — integrating data with creative assets and strategic experience to close the circle and enable continuous improvement for better results. 

No matter the size, location, or industry of a business, quality data will be important for developing more engaging, more effective marketing methods that help those businesses grow revenue. When data is trusted by its users, it lets them be more confident in their strategic and tactical pillars, because the chances are higher that their hypotheses will be proven correct and new opportunities will be uncovered.

Intent Data

It’s one thing to state that “the right data” is as important as the right marketing strategies and tactics. But with seemingly endless sources of marketing data to use, identifying the right data sets for your campaigns and programs can be overwhelming. You might want to start by prioritizing intent data.

Intent data helps marketers determine which potential buyers are actually interested in their products and services. This data can provide insights into buyers’ online behavior and helps to segment out those who have already expressed interest in what you’re selling. It focuses on potential buyers in the early stages of the customer journey, allowing marketers to engage them perhaps before they’ve even discovered the competition.

This type of insight lets marketers focus on multi-channel activation to connect with buyers that are actively exploring the market. Intent signals can help you kick off your campaign at just the right moment. If you find yourself getting spammed with emails from companies trying to interest you in a product you weren’t looking for, they’re probably not utilizing intent data.

Each of these three main data types can include intent data: 

• First-party data — this is customer data you already own, including customer lists, prior buying histories, and information from form fills. It helps you identify visitors to your web pages and social channels.

• Second-party data — this is first-party data you would receive from another company, usually a trusted partner. It can add valuable context and detail to your own first-party data.

• Third-party data — this is data acquired from companies that specialize in collecting it from various sources and packaging it in different types of data sets that can help drive your growth. 

Regardless of where you source it from, the purpose and application of intent data is the same: 

• to enable the refinement of marketing strategies by helping to identify prospects who are actively engaging with the market, and 

• to improve tactical execution with content and messages that are personalized and tailored to buyer interests and needs. 

Integrating First- and Third-Party Data

Marketers usually rely heavily on their first-party data to help guide their strategies and determine their tactics. Second-party data is not widely used; third-party data is generally prioritized because of its greater depth and breadth. Delivered by its providers in easily ingestible formats, third-party data can be invaluable for enriching and expanding upon first-party audience data.  

Third-party data can include intent data, as we just noted. For B2B use cases, it also typically encompasses firmographic data — such as company size, location, and industry — and financial data for both public and private companies. A few data providers can supply corporate family tree information to clarify ownership and relationships among various corporate entities. If consumer personas are being targeted, third-party data can incorporate consumer activities, interests, past purchases, brands already owned, and socio-demographic details such as age, gender, education, and income. B2B or consumer data may be collected online, such as from website visits, social media activity, and digital ad clicks, or offline from in-person transactions, surveys, public records, and other sources.

Ideally, third-party marketing data should be integrated with first-party data to help ensure that data gaps are filled in and the most likely buyers can be identified and connected with. While many business leaders recognize the value of third-party data, many also find it challenging to achieve this integration — or even to obtain this data in the first place. In a recent survey of more than 160 sales, marketing, and revenue executives, Dun & Bradstreet found that only 53% of the responding companies were investing in third-party data; of these, 44% of companies characterized their third-party data as siloed and separate from their other data. 

Keeping Data Healthy and Compliant

Optimizing marketing data usage — especially when artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools are being leveraged — requires that the data pillar be as strong as possible. That strength comes from maintaining data quality standards — particularly accuracy, completeness, standardization, and authority. Marketing data that’s outdated, incomplete, or inconsistent won’t help achieve the goal of reaching qualified leads, no matter how cutting-edge your martech stack might be.

Another data requirement comes from the expansion of data privacy regulations, such the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Whether you’re engaging with contacts in North America or around the world, your data needs to be compliant with the applicable regulations for data collection, processing, and usage. Marketers must maintain their ability to reach out to customers and prospects; if you’re not following the rules, or you’re penalized for noncompliance (for example, your emails get marked as spam), the repercussions can be dire.

With so many marketing teams working with reduced budgets and resources, keeping a focus on the “health and hygiene” of marketing data can be challenging. But well-managed data is a driver of ROI; conversely, dollars are wasted going after the wrong targets when you could have been connecting with the right prospect or customer. Something else to keep in mind: clean, accurate data is the anchor for the feedback loop that enables ongoing refinement of both strategies and tactics. When you have trust in your marketing data, you can also trust the campaign feedback you receive and the performance metrics you’re tracking. Reaching the right targets gives you the opportunity to see which messages resonated best and which tactics were most effective. Those insights will then authentically inform your strategies as you go forward. 

A Firm Foundation for Well-Balanced Marketing Teams

A marketing organization comprises multiple teams overseeing multiple channels — email marketing, website management, paid media, social media, and others. Marketing data, along with strategy and tactics, helps to hold all these teams up and allows them to be guided by the same “north star.” 

When bandwidth constraints become a challenge, the option exists to get help from external organizations that can handle the data piece as well as the marketing strategy and campaign execution. Keeping it all together in a one-stop shop actually is a great way to integrate the data as an organic component of marketing campaigns, instead of having to import it. Strategies and tactics can be built around data that already conforms to the highest standards and best practices: clean, complete, current, and compliant with regional regulations for data collection and processing. In this way, third-party data effectively becomes your first-party data, and campaigns can be optimized to support revenue goals at every step of the customer journey, from the top to the bottom of the funnel.