Intuitive Marketer™ Daily Insight #002 – Data-Driven vs. Data-Aligned, Part 1 

Part 1 in the “Data Driven” series. What’s the difference, and why it matters.

If you’re new to my world, I teach that the foundational components of Intuitive Marketing™ are Intuition, Analytics, and Psychology. Data falls into “analytics,” of course. But is the analytics component really the most important driver of success that we should say that marketing is “data-driven”? 

Honestly, I’m not so sure. 

While I obviously have my own opinions on the matter, I took a gander online and tried to find some consensus on what being “data driven” means to marketers and business leaders and here’s what I found. 

According to Dataversity.com, being a data-driven organization means to be:

"Data-driven organizations base their decisions on the analysis of information that they have confirmed is accurate, relevant, complete, and timely."  

According to Salesforce, 

“Data-driven marketing is a strategic approach that uses information from a variety of sources to gain insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and trends, which in turn drives personalized experiences for your target audience.”

These definitions are about what I suspected: when most of us say we are, or aim to be, “data-driven,” we intend that analytics (the data) are the primary and most important source of information on which actions we should take in our marketing/sales departments and in the overall organization. 

Tomorrow I’ll talk about what “Data Driven” marketing ends up looking like, and when it might make more sense to be Data-Aligned instead.