Data-driven marketing in practice

Data-driven marketing comes down to one simple rule: where the money goes is decided by last month’s numbers, not by the CEO’s gut or by what the competition did.

You don’t need a data warehouse or a dashboard costing 50,000 zł. You need a few numbers collected every month, and the nerve to switch off something that doesn’t add up.

Polish companies have ground to make up

In 2023, 19.3 percent of Polish companies analysed data, against an EU average of 33.2 percent, according to the European Commission’s digital report. In marketing it shows everywhere. This year’s budget is last year’s plus 10 percent. A campaign runs because it always has.

That is good news for you. If your competitors decide by eye, all you have to do is start counting.

The data you actually need

In a B2B company I start with five things:

Where enquiries come from. Website, referral, LinkedIn, trade fairs. A question in the form and a note from sales are enough.
What one enquiry costs in each channel.
How many enquiries become clients. For this you need your sales team, not a tool.
What customers ask. Questions from calls and emails are the best source of content topics.
What they watch. Which videos and posts people watch to the end, and which they scroll past.

The full set of metrics is in how to measure marketing results.

What it looks like with my clients

Grass sells lawn mowers through dealers. I don’t invent video topics. I take them from questions customers ask dealers: how a Honda differs from a Kawasaki, which mower works on a slope. That is data too, just collected by talking. Result: 1.1 million TikTok views in 60 days, 98.6 percent from the For You feed, at 1.70 zł per thousand ad impressions.

At Aperto we counted the cost per contact from day one of the campaign. It came out at about 18 zł. With a number like that, deciding whether to add budget is easy.

Keyspace is the opposite. Beautiful films, zero sales from ads. The data said “stop” sooner than intuition would have, because intuition loved the films.

When data lies

Data tells you what happened. It rarely tells you why.

At BWS Event Support sales take months. No system will tell you which April post won a September contract. So next to the numbers we collect what clients tell the sales team. That they saw the newsletter. That they know the crew from TikTok. Without that, decisions based only on tool data would move budget to whatever is easy to measure rather than to where sales actually start.

Data-driven marketing means deciding on the budget from a few numbers collected every month: where enquiries come from, what they cost and how many become clients. At dabrowskimedia every month of work ends with exactly that decision: what we scale, what we switch off, what we keep testing.

Where to start this week

Add a “how did you hear about us” question to your contact form.
Ask sales for one column in their spreadsheet: client source.
After three months, compare cost and number of clients per channel.
Switch off the weakest channel and move its budget to the best one.

If you’d rather have someone set this up and watch it every month, it’s part of a fractional CMO’s work.

What is data-driven marketing?

A way of running marketing where numbers decide the budget: where enquiries come from, what they cost and how many become clients. Gut feeling is for designing tests, data is for judging them.

Does a small company need data analytics tools?

Not to start. Google Analytics, a question in the form and a spreadsheet kept by sales are enough. Expensive tools only pay off with a large number of leads.

What data matters most in B2B marketing?

Enquiry source, cost per enquiry and enquiry-to-client conversion. Plus the questions customers ask, because the best content comes from them.

Can you trust tool data alone?

Not entirely. With long sales cycles, tools don’t see every touchpoint. Fill the gaps with what clients tell your sales team.

Want to see what data your marketing could run on? Book a free online presence audit.