Supporting Marketing to Go Deeper with Data

Almost every company likes to brag that it’s “customer-oriented,” “customer-first,” or “customer-obsessed.” But there’s no way to center your customer without data-driven operations. Companies that excel in this space do so because they collect useful data and know how to make sense of it.

Data teams are integral to setting up a company’s data culture and ensuring every employee understands how to use data to pursue their mission. At my previous job, that meant collecting behavioral data so our marketers could finally address the issues customers cared about—not the issues we thought they cared about.

Here’s what I learned about implementing Amplitude for digital analytics at a company that wasn’t a data-first operation.

Building a tech stack for customer insights

As data and analytics manager at Mysa, a smart thermostat company, I helped our teams use our vast stores of customer data to do their best work. But our marketing department struggled to connect the dots between ecommerce efforts and the broader product ecosystem.

At the time, we used Shopify, Google Analytics, and Customer.io to gather and organize customer insights. Those tools showed us how customers came to our site, what messaging grabbed their attention, and the products they purchased, but we didn’t have a way to track the full customer journey or determine why drop-offs were happening along the way. We had implemented Segment to return more complex insights when one of our partners recommended Amplitude to fill the customer data gap.

Amplitude integrated with the tools we were already using, which made it easy to add to our tech stack. We worked with a certified Amplitude partner on the implementation, which helped us hit the ground running. Amplitude’s documentation was a great resource throughout the entire implementation process and allowed our team to work alongside our partners to get started even quicker than if we handed it off throughout the process.

Defining a data-driven process

One of the first things we learned was how data-driven our company wasn’t. It’s easy to capture all sorts of data these days; the challenge is capturing the right data and gathering useful insights from it. A genuinely data-driven company logs important customer interactions and uses the experimental process to learn what buyers want.

There are three questions you can ask yourself right now to determine whether your company is data-driven or simply awash in data:

1. Is data and measurement a proactive part of your strategy and development?
2. Do you have a testing mentality in your company?
3. Are you leveraging cohorts to understand audience segments?

For us, the answer to those questions was “not really…” We would launch features and determine their success by customer reactions rather than adoption rates—because we didn’t know what the adoption rates were! Measurement was an afterthought, not a priority, which left us making decisions in the dark.

Our data team realized we needed to do more than just add a new tool to our tech stack. We needed to educate teams on the benefits of a data-driven process and then connect them to the resources necessary to implement one.

Switching to a data-first mentality

One of the hardest things about switching to a tool like Amplitude is getting employees to change the way they think about their process. Teams that have built their own roadmaps and measurement processes may not want to adapt—especially if following the data would mean shifting priorities or changing direction on existing projects.

There are a few steps you can take to start shifting the mindset among the various stakeholders:

Find an internal champion among your exec team: It’s so important to get buy-in at the executive level, especially because the insights Amplitude gives you may lead to rearranging teams or reallocating company resources in a major way. We were lucky to have a centralized data team that could own outreach and education—if your company doesn’t, having executive support makes it easier to land resources for your grassroots efforts.

Start by defining key metrics and work backward from there: Tools like Amplitude can be used in so many ways, including supporting (or disproving) pet theories or inconsequential questions. Get everyone on board by looking at the company strategy and determining the questions that drive your work. When you settle on metrics that can answer those questions, you can set the priorities that will shape how you use Amplitude.

Attend meetings with the teams who will be using the tool: It’s important not only to be seen as a stakeholder in each team’s work but also to hear what employees are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. That knowledge is a big help in planning your org training and choosing which features to implement first.

Start small and chase easy wins: Amplitude can do so much that it’s tempting to jump into the deep end, but this will likely overwhelm employees and stand in the way of getting results. Our marketing team was the first to take the plunge because they knew they needed better data. The behavioral data Amplitude delivered showed how people were interacting with our product and where they were dropping off. Marketing targeted those key inflection points with new campaigns, and suddenly, we had more prospects completing the customer journey.

After improving our marketing campaigns, we shared our data with the product team. They had never had access to such granular insights before, and the experience opened their eyes to the potential of a tool like Amplitude.

Encourage individual ownership of KPIs: Employees think about data differently when they’re the person responsible for improving a certain metric. That kind of ownership encourages them to dig into the new tool and see how they can use it for their purposes. When they share their wins, they’ll also have a story of how Amplitude helped them, making them another internal champion of the new system.

That said, it takes time for companies to adjust to new tools. It takes even more time to change cultural aspects, like moving to a testing mentality. At times, the only thing you can do is be patient and make sure you are accessible as a resource for people who need help.

Helping marketing teams adapt

Marketers use data, but they don’t have the same relationship to it as someone who works on a data team. Data and analytics managers can lend their expertise to help employees adjust to the reality of data-driven work.

Getting teams started

Tailored training sessions help marketing teams see how they can gather useful data from a tool like Amplitude. Generic tutorials are much less effective than hands-on workshops that invite marketers to see what types of data Amplitude can collect. Walk them through the strengths of the tool, and you’ll be making a case for it while providing practical training they can return to later.

Live workshops also enable marketers to bring their expertise—they may ask questions you hadn’t thought of. When you can show them how to access data to find the answers, you’re making a great case for adoption.

At the same time, some employees aren’t the type to fire up Amplitude on their own and dig into the data. Building dashboards for these individuals gives them an entry point and a way to use the tool. They may not see the same results as colleagues who are enthused by the new tool, but especially when you’re in adoption mode, sometimes “good enough” is the goal.

Demonstrating data-driven thinking

Amplitude is great because it enables teams to dig deeply into their data, but employees who aren’t used to doing that may benefit from coaching. Our marketing team was used to Google Analytics (and all its limitations), so making use of Amplitude’s richer dataset required a shift in mindset.

Our motto became “Keep asking why.” Have you noticed that traffic from mobile ad campaigns is way higher than desktop, but that conversion rate is significantly lower? Why is that? Is the mobile experience not great? Are people more likely to make purchases when they’re on a desktop computer because it’s less of an impulsive purchase? By teaching marketers to chase these answers, we gave them the tools to create more effective campaigns.

Continuing education

If marketing teams don’t know how to answer those “why” questions, help them find the data they need. I got the best results from finding answers for the team and recording Loom videos of ourselves doing so. That gave employees a reference for the next time. I also made myself available to double-check their work, which gave them the confidence to try things on their own. This combination of practices resulted in a big shift to employees being able to answer their own questions instead of going through us.

Videos aren’t the only helpful reference. A taxonomy everyone can access (such as a shared Google spreadsheet) makes a great cheat sheet for marketers who are sure the answer is there somewhere but don’t know where to look first. I also made a front-page summary that laid out the basics of what Amplitude could do for marketing efforts.

Data-driven growth gets you there faster

Setting up data collection will only get you so far if you don’t know what to look for and how to make use of the insights you gather. Behavioral data and a tool that helps you decipher it enables your marketing team to launch smarter, more effective campaigns.