The Importance of a Data-Driven Creative Engine

Marketing teams know how to recruit talented, creative people. It’s part of the job. But that’s only half the battle. A key to a well-oiled marketing team is how well the team members work together. A common problem we've seen with Ladder clients and other marketing teams we've worked with is that it doesn’t matter how accomplished and awesome the team is if they aren’t collaborating and working together efficiently. It’s not uncommon to find marketing teams with a variety of unique skill sets and talents, but if they get boxed in working alone in silos, then the talent of the team as a whole isn’t being fully maximized. 

Teamwork Over Individuality Is Extremely Important

A team of fantastic, creative individuals working on their own can only go so far. The phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” could never be more true than in this type of environment. A marketing team will always be stronger, more creative, and more efficient working collectively than they would alone. Understanding the power of the group and making sure that team members are working together is key to developing a system that will produce better strategies and maximize the best outcomes. Ladder has achieved this goal by creating and executing a system called the data-driven creative engine.  

Why Is A Data-Driven Creative Engine Superior?

Some of the most common questions that we get asked at Ladder are, “What makes a Ladder growth team unique?” and “How is it going to add real, meaningful, differentiated value to our clients?”  The answer is the same, regardless of whether you work for your own internal team, with an agency like Ladder, or with anyone else. And the answer is this: the abilities, skills, and talents of your marketing team as a whole are greater than the sum of the combined individual talents and skills. 

Having a system in place that provides a clear methodology for how the individual team members can interact and work together to produce positive growth outcomes and maximize your chances of achieving those outcomes with it is essential. Without it, you could be too wrapped up in the day-to-day data and all the short-term fluctuations and problems that naturally arise in digital marketing and not focused on how to organize the team to produce better results. It's not hard to lose sight of the big picture. The data-driven creative engine system can help your team achieve better performance in the same way that the engine in a supercar can produce high-performance results, allowing you to reach positive growth outcomes faster and more efficiently. 

How The Data-Driven Creative Engine Works

We built the data-driven creative engine system at Ladder so that at any given time, your team is maximizing efforts and working toward a shared goal. We break down the goals into key performance indicators (KPIs), where each KPI represents a touchpoint in the customer creation model, whether it's top funnel traffic acquisition, mid-funnel initial conversions, or bottom-funnel improvement to customer lifetime value, referral, retention, and other similar types of activities.

By using the touchpoints as a representation of the customer creation journey, you can engage your team to work together on the touchpoints with the shared goal of attracting more customers. You only have a finite number of resources on your team, so allocating them strategically to focus the right KPIs at the right time maximizes effort. 

Using Touchpoints in Marketing

Each touchpoint is where a potential customer is going to interact with your brand, whether the touchpoint involves getting, converting, or retaining traffic. The goal is for your brand to cause a positive reaction in the customer at each touchpoint. You want them to pause, consider your business, believe you are going to provide something they want or need, and then take a positive next step. 

A good way to think about the KPIs or touchpoints is that they are destinations where you can allocate the right resources to improve how your brand communicates to potential customers and entice them to take positive action and become purchasing customers. 

These destination points could be any number of things, including on-site messaging on a given page, something you're using to trigger a specific behavior, or a bottom-funnel email or other CRM-type retention activity. 

Content Is Your Fuel

At Ladder, the focus of our growth teams begins with how to effectively and strategically map out the destination points and allocate the right resources to them. After that, we brainstorm how to utilize content across the destinations. Content is the fuel that drives your data-driven creative engine to best get your message out there to the right people at the right touchpoints.

We’ve looked at how this methodology works by positioning your team members on the right touchpoints at the right time, so they are working together to improve the brand experience. You do that by allocating them in such a way as to ensure that you engage the right specialized teams at the right time based on your strategy, which results in creating the best content across all touchpoints. Once you have your teams in place, then you can focus on different types of creative fuel, such as static images, animation, customer testimonial videos, or brand videos that will help get your message out there. 

Collect Your Data

As the name suggests, data-driven creative is based on data. Collect your data by using market research and customer insights, and use that data to make sure you have the right resources focused on the right destination points at the right time. A good marketing team working together will do the best job at prioritizing resources, KPIs, and touchpoints in the most strategic way. This will allow you to input the best type of fuel to help your brand stand out, resonate, and get positive reactions.

Ladder’s Experience Using Data-Driven Creative

We know the importance of data-driven creative because it’s what we specialize in. Not only have we grown our own company with this method, but we’ve helped companies around the world realize the potential of data-driven marketing, where strategy and content rule rather than simple results. Contact us today to learn how we can transform your marketing strategy into one that’s proven to work.