Unlock the power of data to create impact: 4 crucial tips

As we step into 2025, a year packed with the promise of the ever-increasing influence of AI innovations like predictive analytics, personalized automation, and advanced machine learning, the time to act is now. It’s no longer enough to view data as a mere resource to stay competitive—it must be treated as a strategic asset that drives decision-making and creates tangible value.

Despite the opportunities, many companies continue to grapple with integrating data effectively across marketing and other departments. To help overcome these challenges and unlock the full potential of data-driven strategies, Griet Heylen gives four essential tips to elevate your marketing game and deliver a measurable impact. Her work is rooted in the belief that data, while complex, must be presented in an intuitive, understandable, and actionable manner.

TIP #1: Begin with the end in mind

To ensure every action drives meaningful impact, you need to start by clarifying the impact you want to achieve. Why is this so important? Because one of the biggest problems companies face when starting to dive in the data is over-analyzing and losing focus, time and money in the process. To optimize your resources well, you need to set your objectives and focus on taking the right actions which you know will influence your KPI. This will also give you a good idea of which data you need to be looking at, which in turn will form as a clear briefing to your data team to prepare, model and output the data in the right way.

How?
A great tool for this is by analyzing which drivers influence your KPI. Then, you translate these drivers into Objective Key Results (OKR’s) and work on optimizing these. An OKR is a simple metric to make sure your marketing efforts are focused on things of which you know and have validated they will influence your KPI.

TIP #2: When it comes to actions, act enough

Data alone isn’t enough to create impact; taking the right actions bridges the gap between insights and results. Adopting an experimental mindset allows businesses to test and iterate quickly, uncovering the actions, channels, and messages that truly move the needle. It will also help you to focus on results by measuring metrics and making decisions based on the data you get back instead of gut-feeling.

How?
Start small and use data and control groups to analyze whether your experiments are really creating impact. Build a cross-functional team that can work end to end and quickly innovate and iterate. Use marketing automation tools to automate campaigns so you can spend more time on redefining the strategy versus the operations.

TIP #3: Simplicity first!

A straightforward narrative around data is essential for decision-makers. As more marketeers onboard data within their day-to-day, simplicity and user-friendliness should be prioritized so the right conclusions can be drawn, independently of the data teams. We often put much effort into making our websites user-friendly for consumers, but we neglect this aspect for our own internal customers, our employees. By focusing on UX/UI within dashboards and delivering insights, decision-makers who navigate complex insights daily can do so more efficiently and quickly.

How?
By investing in branding and user experience for your data products you can create data products such as insights and dashboards that are intuitive, user-friendly and easy to use. This will increase the use of using data within other business departments and avoids wrong decisions being taken because of complexity.

TIP #4: Mind the gap between business and data teams

Data undergoes a lot of steps, from creation, to processing, modeling, etc. to finally presentation. Even over small details like the definition of a “customer” miscommunication can lead to significant setbacks. It’s vital that both teams share a common language and understanding, ensuring that data is interpreted and utilized correctly. A small difference in definition can take a lot of time and lead to incorrect campaigns being launched. To prevent such issues, data literacy is key to create a common language and understanding.

How?
An easy way to do this is by bringing data profiles closer to the business. This can mean having a data translator bridging the gap between marketing and data teams. Providing regular trainings and check-ins between the two teams. But also, by cataloguing your data and having clear definitions of your data.

Get ready to transform data into a strategic asset

Aligning data with business strategy and making complex information accessible to everyone are key enablers of gaining competitive advantage. By ensuring that data is collected, analyzed, understood, and acted upon in the right way, Griet has helped many industry leaders create growth.