"I just have a gut feeling" is an expression you would probably not expect to ever hear in such a data-driven environment as marketing, but we have heard it often. Where we need to rely on a gut feeling, there is clearly an absence of data, and so instinctive actions based on experience and an understanding of the market come into play.
With so much at stake for ROI from strictly monitored budgets, this can be a huge risk, especially because no data to make the decision means no data to track its efficacy.
So why is this happening? Yes, it is true that education institutions are often large and decentralized, with systems and processes that do not always join up and talk to each other. Manual processing of information can be siloed, with team members not always aware that information they are capturing is of great importance to others in the team.
However, short of a process overhaul, there is very often a simpler way to make better data-driven decisions and measurements. Yes, we are talking about attribution models; in other words, ways to figure out what the exact touchpoints are which lead to conversions.
