Marketing has always been part art and part science. For decades, gut feelings, creativity, and intuition drove great campaigns. But can instinct-driven campaigns always hit the mark? What about the risks?
Relying on intuition alone can lead to costly mistakes. That’s why successful marketers use data to validate their marketing instincts.
This shift isn’t about dismissing creativity. It’s about backing your marketing expertise with data-driven insights to make informed decisions, optimize marketing spend, and drive growth.
What is marketing expertise?
Marketing expertise is the blend of creativity, skills, knowledge, and experience that allows you to create and implement impactful marketing strategies. It’s about:
- Knowing your audience
- Spotting market trends before they emerge
- Making strategic decisions based on years of insight and data
Balancing marketing instincts with data-driven insights
At first glance, creativity and data seem mutually exclusive. After all, one deals with emotion and storytelling, while the other talks about numbers and analysis.
But creativity and data aren’t at odds—they complement each other. Creativity generates bold, fresh ideas. Data ensures those ideas reach the right audience and achieve measurable results by showing trends, consumer behavior, and resonated messaging.
Keep learning: The evolution of data-driven marketing
Creativity and data work together in marketing
Let’s break down the benefits of using data in marketing and how you can combine it with your marketing intuition.
- Data analysis reveals opportunities: Audience data tells you more than just demographics; it reveals preferences, behaviors, and motivations. Instead of guessing what your audience wants, data tells you what they’re already interested in. From there, you can personalize messages that align with those desires and build relationships with your customers. In fact, 72% of marketers are already using AI for personalization, according to Hubspot’s State of Marketing Report.
- Testing leads to better ideas: Experiment with different creative approaches to see what works best, allowing you to improve your marketing campaigns continuously.
- Let data refine, not replace: Use data as guidance—from getting the best launch time to understanding the best marketing channels to target. But let your creative instincts lead the storytelling.
What if your data conflicts with your marketing instincts?
It’s a common scenario—your data might suggest one direction, but your marketing instincts point to another. When this happens, consider these approaches:
- Dig deeper into the data: Are you missing something? Is there any data you haven’t taken into account? Analyze your data from different angles to see trends you haven’t noticed.
- Test on a small scale: Run a limited campaign version to gather data and validate your instinct before launching on a broader scale.
- Find a compromise: Blend elements from both the data and your instincts. You can still keep your creative vision intact while aligning parts of the campaign with what the data suggests.
Building credibility with data-backed decisions
Data doesn’t just validate your decisions—it builds credibility. Marketing investment decisions based purely on instincts can raise eyebrows in boardrooms. While you might believe wholeheartedly in a creative campaign, stakeholders want proof that it will work. This is where data and technical marketing skills come in handy.
When your marketing team has data to back up your choices, you’re not just relying on a “feeling”—you’re presenting evidence that your idea has merit. Having data to support your annual marketing planning is especially helpful when you’re pushing for more innovative or out-of-the-box ideas that might seem risky. Data helps reduce that risk, giving every stakeholder more confidence in your team’s decisions.
Say you’re pitching a new product launch campaign, but leadership is hesitating. You can show historical data from similar campaigns and predictive models that forecast success to make a strong case for your approach and prove your areas of expertise in marketing.
Here’s why data matters:
- Stronger proposals: Data-backed campaigns are easier to pitch and defend.
- Easier leadership buy-in: Executives are more likely to trust your intuitive marketing strategies when data support them. Prove the effectiveness of your campaigns through a full profit and loss (P&L) statement and KPIs such as:
- Bigger budgets: According to a Keen study, 50% of marketers face difficulty in securing marketing budgets. Data helps justify future marketing budgets and additional marketing roles.
Keep learning: Proving Marketing Impact to Your CFO
Tools for quantifying marketing intuition
Data analytics tools make it possible to quantify intuition and creativity. They provide actionable insights that you can use to validate or refine your marketing instincts, giving you informed intuition.
Predictive analytics solutions eliminate the guesswork by analyzing historical data to forecast future outcomes. For example, if you’re considering reallocating your budget from TV ads to paid search, Keen can forecast how this will impact your revenue, helping you drive profitability.
Other tools to refine your marketing strategy include:
- Google Analytics
- A/B testing
- Social sentiment analysis
- Heatmap analysis
The difference between these options and predictive analysis is that predictive analytics helps you understand the consequences before you spend your marketing dollars on testing.
Successful data-validated marketing campaigns
Still wondering if data really makes a difference? Let’s review success stories that show how brands used data to validate their areas of expertise in marketing and drive success.
1. 52% net profit increase by spending 15% less
A leading non-alcoholic craft beer company initially focused heavily on its marketing intuition of brand building, resulting in negative profits. But then, using data, it found the right mix to achieve its growth goals and strategically optimize for profit.
Result: A 52% net profit increase while spending 15% less. This shift validated the brand’s new data-driven media planning strategy, which proved that profitability and growth could coexist with the right investment mix.
Non-alcoholic craft beer company increased profits using Keen’s platform
Read more: 3 Key Factors Missing From Your Marketing Mix Model
2. $12M additional revenue with the same budget
A seasonal brand was initially hesitant to change its back-to-school investment strategy and shake the status quo. However, it overcame its fear by trusting data and tweaking its marketing channel allocations.
Result: The brand unlocked an additional $12M in YoY revenue and saw a 49% increase in profit ROI without increasing its budget.
Keen’s optimized metrics for a seasonal brand
3. $1.2M increase in profit with more efficient tactics
A brand specializing in pitchers, dispensers, and replacement filters struggled to reach its target by just following its instinct of focusing on top-of-the-funnel tactics.
The brand used Keen to gain clear data insights, change the marketing mix, and shift the budget toward relevant lower-funnel channels like TikTok and eRetail.
Result: The budget reallocation resulted in a $1.2M increase in profit despite a $500K YoY reduction in media investment.
Increase in revenue for a leading brand by changing marketing mix using Keen
Learn more: How to Create a Full-Funnel Marketing Strategy
Support your areas of expertise in marketing with Keen’s data-driven insights
Instead of thinking of data as a boundary, see it as a starting point. Use it to fuel creativity, with your marketing expertise spotting patterns and interpreting insights that might be missed otherwise. Marketing instincts will still matter, guiding decisions that data can confirm or challenge.
Keen’s adaptive MMM platform further validates your creative instincts, giving you the insights to make data-backed decisions that drive real results. It’s capable of analyzing diverse data sources across all media channels, ensuring your marketing budget is allocated efficiently.
Ready to turn your instincts into insights? Validate your next big idea by starting your free trial with Keen today.
