Transport yourself back to 2005. Google Analytics was brand new and all of a sudden, poof! We could measure marketing results in a tangible way.

From 2005-2010, digital marketing analytics became commonplace.

But from there, in many ways, things devolved.

The expectation emerged that because you can measure everything, you therefore should measure everything.

And as a result, companies started making bad decisions because they were optimizing their marketing programs for leading metrics like traffic and leads instead of optimizing for meaningful business outcomes like pipeline and revenue.

It’s time to start layering common sense on top of marketing data. And it’s also time to get back to core marketing fundamentals:

  • Deeply understanding who your customer is (at both a company and human level)
  • Crafting your brand narrative, value proposition and supporting content around the things that matter to those exact people
  • Learning where those individuals consume information online
  • Delivering your message to them in those places