A few weeks ago, I hosted a panel talk about digital marketing trends. During Q&A time, someone towards the front of the room raised her hand and asked one of our speakers something along the lines of, "If you had a budget of $10,000 and you were faced with the choice of using the money to create a video that could go viral, or you could put it into advertisements, which one would you do? Would you go for the creative option, or would you go for the data-driven advertising method?"

Her question gave our panellists a bit of pause for thought - it was certainly an interesting question, and one that marketing professionals struggle with a lot.

After all, the marketing campaigns we hear about are the creative ones - the ones with a viral video, or a super catchy slogan, or a multi-faceted guerilla marketing campaign involving a gamified mobile app and hidden smart stickers, or whatever crazy new initiative a marketing executive had dreamt up. Very few go to their friends and say, 'Oh my God, did you see how cleverly that company hit me with dynamic retargeting ads on Facebook? I thought that was so creative/smart/clever!"

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These high-level, creative type campaigns are also often what is encouraged in universities - recently, a friend informed me that for one of her university marketing assignments, she was working with a non-for-profit organisation, and had been tasked with fixing the issue of declining funding. Her solution was to build an app that would encourage kids to take an active role in caring for a particular animal. The idea is certainly creative and cute. It's also faithful to one of the core tenets of marketing, which is to create emotional connections with audiences. In that aspect, something like that would work...

...if the organisation has a lot of money to burn.

For some companies out there, this might be the case, in which case I say, 'Good on you! Feel free to go crazy with crazy brand-building campaigns."

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But for most companies, I suspect that they can't say the same. Budgets are always tight, even more so for marketing - history shows when times get a little harsh and companies have to run leaner, one of the first things that get cut is the marketing budget. That's because it's easier for a company to say, "well, I'm in bad times, and it doesn't look like my marketing is helping out anyway," than to start firing people. 

But when marketing budgets do get cut, the only people we can blame are the marketers ourselves.

Why?

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Because we do such a bad job at proving our marketing is helping the business.

This brings us back to the question the lady posed to the panel. Be creative, or use data and run advertisements?

While the other panelists stated it was a fusion of both, I'd have to argue that when it comes to marketing, there's no issue smart use of data cannot fix. In fact, I'd even say data, both quantitative and qualitative can almost replace creativity in certain aspects. Companies can get by without sinking huge amounts of money into big campaigns. 

So here are 3 reasons why investing your budget into data and advertisements is better for your business.