Your Gut Instinct is Trash
The purpose of this post is to deliver some tough love to all people in business. Too often, I hear of professionals make marketing decisions because of their “gut instincts” or because it “feels right.” Well, I hate to break it to you, but that is a poor way to make a business decision. Also, for the record, you don’t sound like an all-knowing expert when you take this approach. You come across as flippant and out of touch.
If I haven’t offended you yet and you’re still reading, congrats!
So if we are not to make decisions based on feelings and instincts, what is the best way to make them? That answer is simple - you must evaluate and analyze your data. For example, you could take your customer data and group similar customer types or demographics together. From there, you can identify trends and compare them to other groups. You can also run tests and see if the results are statistically significant, proving their effectiveness!
Try not to be intimidated by the mathematical terms! There are so many programs (even Excel!) that can do the math for you. It is worth taking the time to learn, and there are lots of resources for free online.
Too many fellow creatives claim that they “don’t do numbers.” But if you crack the (easy) code, you will put yourself in a position to provide meaningful and strategic recommendations with quantitive reasoning to back them up! Ultimately, this helps you spend your marketing budget more effectively and puts your business in a much better position to achieve success!
