Marketing: When You Should Trust Data More Than Your Instincts

When it comes to marketing, your own observation of audience trends isn’t sufficient without being backed up by data.

According to Andrew Hanelly, senior vice president of strategy of McMurry/TMG, a marketer without data is like a cab driver without GPS: “Too often we rely on our own limited perspective, ignoring data and making decisions based on the casual observations born of our own limited scope of experience.”

Take one marketer Hanelly was working with for example. After testing subject lines, the team found that the marketer’s audience gravitated more toward short, casual subject lines in emails. But the marketer refused to change, saying that he “would never open that type of email. It sounds unprofessional.”

The marketer made a decision despite what his audience was clearly telling him, “and the poof was in the data,” Hanelly writes. “His focus group of one was wrong and the audience was right.”

Find more tips on how to use data in marketing at McMurry/TMG.