Netlify's Dorian Kendal: Three essential principles for data-driven marketing success

Listen to the full conversation with Dorian on the Grow With It podcast:

Find a data-driven marketer, and they’ll have a story about data inaccuracies hindering their ability to identify growth opportunities, accurately track ROI, or confidently forecast for the business. Dorian Kendal is no different. The CMO at Netlify actually cut his teeth in operations and data, taking his skills to the likes of Google, Twitter, and then Trulia where he discovered a love of marketing and growth. This led him to Unity, where he took on the challenge of building and leading parts of the marketing department for the real-time 3D game engine as it grew from 750 to nearly 6,000 employees. 

“I'll never forget, one of my first days at a new company, I had a meeting with one of the people that was onboarding me and he was the Head of Data Analytics at the time. We sat down and he said, ‘I'm gonna, I walk you through the data.’

And he looked at one number—website visitors. It was from Google Analytics, and he said, ‘I think this number's probably 30% wrong’. And then he showed me another number, which was around sales. And he said, ‘I think this is probably 40% wrong.’

There were so many problems that came out of that. Here I was, flying blind, trying to achieve goals for marketing and also to work with our sales teams to help them achieve their goals. And it caused us to really erroneously forecast what our revenue should be in our volume for the next year.” 

After going through this experience more than once, and coming out the other end with accurate data, Kendal has landed on a few proven strategies that any marketer can use to start attacking the problem as soon as it’s identified. 

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Three guiding principles to start solving data inaccuracies

When you’re looking at data sets that are 30% incorrect, it’s easy to feel at a loss. How is a business supposed to come back from that? 

“It all starts with guiding principles,” shared Kendal. “If you have those principles from the start, that drives the beginning of the discussion and the start of the resolution.” For Kendal, the three guiding principles are:

• Data should always be instrumented before anything goes live. 

• Have your dashboards ready to go. 

• Validate that the data is correct. 

“When you have these three guiding principles and you make sure that those are done before you go live, that to me is the starting point of solving the problem.” 

With this foundation in stone, you’ll be better placed to prove how performance has been impacted by the insights you’ve developed, building the case for something that many growth leaders are now advocating for: A data team or individual being embedded in the marketing team. 

Retention and activation at Unity and the importance of building on what you know

While at Unity, Kendal’s team were tasked with fixing retention and activation. Their first major step was to hire a data expert, who came on board to help find the answers to a series of very specific questions. 

They started with something simple and specific. “What’s the metric that defines success for the first 30 minutes of someone’s engagement with our products?” After that, they moved on. “What is it for the first day? What should they be doing?” 

And, Kendall continues, “slowly over time this big query built webpage started with one metric and we kept adding and adding, and lo and behold a year later we had fully segmented our audience. We know from people coming in for onboarding what the chances of retention were. We saw retention overall rise dramatically. But this entire thing started with a single metric.”

If the idea of big data is daunting or you're dealing with large volumes of potentially inaccurate data, this focus and build approach will increase your chances of success and help you build a data platform that does what you need it to. 

“Your data platform, it's not a day one thing. As marketers, we're always learning what's more effective in our campaigns. We're seeing how people engage with emails that we send click-through rates and open rates. We see how that translates into sales. Those things change over time. So why shouldn't the data platform also follow?”

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