#39 Working data-driven as a key component of your marketing strategy

We are living in the fastest-changing communications technology landscape than ever before. New software and applications are sprouting up like mushrooms. Think about it, fifty years ago, the majority of people did not have email addresses. But nowadays it’s virtually impossible to conduct any kind of process in your sports organization without an email.

Less than twenty years ago Facebook didn’t exist. But now it has been downloaded by at least 5 billion people. That is more than 60% of the world's population. Humanity has become more technological. So, “if you can’t beat them, join them”, right?

This is where working data-driven comes into play. Whether you are a league, federation, or club, a men’s team or women’s team, no matter the region of the world you find yourself in, working data-driven is key to the success of your organization.

One of the biggest challenges to working data-driven that sports organizations face is having data stored in many different sources. For example, your merchandise stats would be on one platform while your ticketing data would be on another. This is a huge issue because:

1. It takes a lot of effort and time to make sense out of your data let alone derive any kind of useful insights from it
2. You can’t share this data easily with the rest of the team, especially those from other departments as you would have to individually access each source to do. Once again, quite consuming and laborious.
3. It’s had to make innovative and proactive decisions about the future of your organization if you can’t really get the full picture from all your data since it’s scattered all over many sources.

So the most important step towards working data-driven is ensuring that you get a reliable single source of truth that can show you actionable insights from your supporter behavior. And this reliable single source of truth is a sports CDP. If you have already done your research and know the impressive results you can get with a CDP, today we want to give you practical tips on how to ensure that your entire organization has a data-driven culture. If you are not quite at this stage yet, don’t worry, we have you covered. We have many resources on our website to help you catch up to speed, find link in the description below.

If you want to ensure that your entire sports organization has a data-driven approach to everything, here are some practical tips:

1. Start at the top - Top management needs to understand the importance of working data-driven and then embrace this fully. They need to lead by example and set that expectation of working data-driven.
2. Communicate why you’re going data-driven with the rest of your team - Making changes and adopting a “because management decided so” approach does not work. Instead, you have to communicate your vision with your team.
3. Improve data transparency - You simply cannot preach a culture that is unattainable. This is a strong CDP use case because a CDP keeps data organized, unified, updated, and stored in one place. Moreover, the CDP can be integrated with other systems such as your ticketing system, and Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). And this data can be shared easily with other departments and the rest of the team.
4. Measure the before and after - It’s one thing to tell people that something works and it’s entirely another to show them.
5. Applaud your team - Embracing change can be very difficult. So if your team has done incredibly well in implementing all the changes, you have to encourage them by celebrating them.

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