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Lesson 1.3. Marketing Research Tools and Data-Driven Marketing

Using Data in Decision-Making and Strategy

As mentioned, working with data is a key component of a marketer’s role today—you may be helping to collect the data, analyzing it, or just using it to inform decisions. Regardless of the application, you’ll most likely be working with data a lot if you go into marketing.

Using data in business decision-making requires us to translate the business needs into data and then interpret the results in ways that are insightful and meaningful for the business. This is called data mapping, and a five-phase process guides it.

  1. Challenge

    identifying and understanding the business challenge: In this phase, we first determine what needs to be addressed—for example, why is our customer satisfaction declining? Then, we break down that need into conceptual components, associating them with metrics and data.

  2. Metrics and Analyses

    selecting the right metrics and marketing analyses: In this phase, we determine the appropriate metrics for measuring our concepts. We also determine where our data will come from—Will we conduct a study internally, hire a market research firm, or use existing or syndicated data?—and what statistics we'll use to analyze the data.

  3. Results

    identifying meaningful results: When you’ve got lots of data, selecting the best nuggets requires careful consideration. You’ll want to target data results that illuminate the problem at hand and are statistically significant.

  4. Insight

    developing actionable insights: It's not enough to simply identify meaningful data results. Those results need to then be interpreted within the context of the marketing challenge and the business itself. A perspective and context should situate the data results.

  5. Application

    recommending strategic applications: Here’s where we put the data and insights into action. This requires aligning the insights with action-oriented recommendations. 

The most important part of this process is the beginning, which ensures that your data is well matched to the business challenge at hand. Making decisions based on data that’s not directly illustrative of the things you’re trying to understand will lead only to misaligned strategy. It’s very important that the folks who get the data—those designing the studies or working with the vendors to purchase data—have both strong research skills and strong business acumen so that they can accurately match data to business needs.


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