Steve Armenti

The balance is key. Google's marketing mantra is "know the user, know the magic" and it's extremely relevant here. Data helps you know the user. Data can be valuable in understanding your market, your ICP, and the individual personas. But the magic is all intuition. Using the data, you then need to interpret it using your own human judgement and lived experiences. When you can figure out the "magic" that is the value you provide as a business and where it perfectly aligns with the quantitative data you have about your customer, you've got it right. That should be the goal of blending the art and science of marketing.

These models show you how all your marketing efforts (webinars, social, emails, ads, community, etc) work to contribute to marketing sourced revenue. You can track all customer interactions across channels using these models (U-shaped or W-shaped) to understand profitability in your spend so you can optimize your budget, and increase performance.

"Understanding you data" is easier said than done. Too many marketers lack depth in how to actually look at data, infer patterns, generate insights and apply that understanding into actual marketing program adjustments or optimizations. My advice: learn how to do this or hire a fantastic team that already knows how. One of the things I do is: 1. Review the top line metrics 2. Find something that changed 3. WHY? 4. Follow the WHY'S Let's say your signups went up 15%. WHY? Homepage visits went up. WHY? Organic search traffic increased. WHY? A certain keyword started ranking. WHY? The content team launched new articles 4 mos ago. WHY? Etc....

Attach operations to a revenue number. Prove that operations either 1) accelerates revenue creation or 2 unblocks revenue creation and retention. Do that and you'll never be underinvested and never fall behind.

The growth mindset compounds. Small, incremental moments throughout your career where you took risks, challenged the status quo, and embraced risk will build up into your professional brand. Growth mindset isn't something you do today, it's a philosophy and way of approaching business. You carry that with you your whole career.

Before segmentation, not clearly understanding your ICP. Anything you do after that will fail if you don't understand your ICP