Book profile

Data-Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know

Mark Jeffery

A practical guide showing that focusing on just 15 essential marketing metrics lets any organization measure, justify, and radically improve marketing performance and gain competitive advantage.

Based on research of 252 firms capturing $53 billion of annual marketing spending, Mark Jeffery reveals a 'marketing divide' between the fewer than 20 percent of firms that practice data-driven marketing and the majority that do not—and shows that the leaders enjoy significantly better financial and market performance. Rather than overwhelming readers with 50 or 100 possible metrics, Jeffery distills the field to the 15 metrics everyone in marketing should know, organized as five essential nonfinancial metrics, four financial metrics (plus CLTV), and five new-age Internet metrics. With downloadable Excel templates, real case studies (Best Buy, Continental Airlines, Harrah's, DuPont, Microsoft, Royal Bank of Canada, Sears), and concrete strategies to overcome the five obstacles to data-driven marketing, the book equips marketers and non-marketers alike to quantify the value of marketing, justify spending, and become heroes in their organizations.

The model

A causal model in which data-driven marketing capabilities (design levers) and organizational conditions shape psychological/behavioral states across the purchasing funnel (awareness, evaluation, trial, loyalty), which are captured by the 15 essential metrics and drive marketing and firm performance outcomes.

Frameworks you can use

If you can measure something, you can control it and radically improve it.
Sustainable competitive advantage comes from the coordination of activities not easily duplicated, of which data-driven marketing is a key component.
Think big, start small, scale up fast.
Focus on the few metrics that point to value rather than tracking dozens.
Always add value, not subtract value, from the customer interaction—answer 'What's in it for me?' for the customer.
It is better to be approximately right than exactly wrong; large-sample qualitative data can point to future value.

Key terms

Data-Driven Marketing Capability: The organizational ability to use centralized customer data, analytics, metrics, and experiments to manage and optimize marketing decisions.
Marketing Measurement Design: The up-front practice of defining vision, objectives, metrics, scorecards, and tracking before launching a campaign.
Experimentation and Targeting: Use of controlled experiments and analytic targeting to isolate causality and direct marketing to the right customers.
Marketing Infrastructure: The technology systems (EDW, operational CRM, analytics, MRM) enabling data collection and scaled data-driven marketing.
Data-Driven Marketing Culture: Organizational culture supporting data-driven marketing through sponsorship, aligned incentives, training, and transparency.
Customer Brand Awareness: The customer's ability to recall and recognize a product, service, or company.
Purchase Intent / Test-Drive Propensity: Customer intent to buy reflected in evaluative behaviors and survey-stated intent prior to purchase.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Customer satisfaction and willingness to recommend a product or service.