For years, Marketers have been trying to deliver personalized experiences that convert prospects into buyers. Why has this been so elusive for so long? The inability to recruit, train and deploy data-driven marketing teams.

In fact, 80% of respondents in a recent decision intelligence study acknowledged that the ability to access and analyze data has a positive impact on their decision-making; another study by IDC and Alteryx found 94% of business executives believe that analytics are important for their organizations to remain performant.

Making sense of the massive amount of data that exists today requires skills outside the scope of even the most experienced marketer. Therefore, the task of analyzing collected data often falls to already-overloaded data teams, which subsequently slows decision-making and reaction to ever-changing markets. To remain agile, modern marketing teams should embrace a culture of “upskilling” and automation to shape marketers into the data analytics aficionados that businesses sorely need.

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Upskilling best practices to build a data-literate, modern marketing team

Here, we outline six best practices for upskilling a data-literate, modern marketing team to achieve more data-driven results and a competitive advantage.

1. Encourage proficiency in leveraging automation through AI. Generative AI technologies are a mainstay now, and marketing teams must understand how to leverage these tools to properly use data. Learning how to ask the right questions of these technologies is imperative to uncover valuable information about how and why your customers choose to engage with your business.

2. Make data and analytics tools more accessible to all users. Upskilling a modern marketing team so that it’s data-literate begins by making data accessible and available. This means that siloed data formerly available to only a few should be migrated to a cloud platform, where even more credentialed users can easily access the data they need, from any device and location.

3. Determine the team’s existing skills — and identify gaps relevant to data literacy. Your marketing team is rich in valuable marketing knowledge and business acumen, providing them with a deep understanding of the insights they need and the problems they must solve, such as a customer’s preference for interacting with the business or how they are led through the sales funnel. While marketers do not need to be data science experts to gain insights from data, it is important for them to understand the basics of data literacy to be more efficient and effective with data. To build those skills, narrow down your own data analysis needs and the corresponding skills required for data literacy, then survey your team to determine where skills gaps exist. Create curricula personalized to each team member’s needs.

4. Teach the basics first. Educating team members on the nuances of analytics tools won’t automatically translate to usable insights. Make sure you start by defining the foundational problem you’re trying to solve and the kind of data you’re looking for to solve it. That way, everyone is clear on objectives and you’ll be more likely to derive the right insights.

5. Make sure the technology is user-friendly and self-service. Advanced analytics tools can be daunting. Take the complexity out of the picture by leveraging no-code , self-service platforms. This has the added benefit of accelerating the learning process.

6. Engage your learners. Building knowledge is an ongoing process, and you want to keep it moving forward. So, if education is made too arduous or boring, the entire endeavor will fizzle. To ensure newly learned skills stick, create an engaging, fun environment. Gamify experiences with quizzes and leaderboards to incentivize learners to continue adding to their skillset. And, creating a flexible learning environment in which team members can learn new skills at their own pace will ensure learning remains a priority.

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Final thoughts

Upskilling your marketing team in analytics isn’t a check-the-box training program. Rather, it’s an investment — in the individual team members, in the team as a whole and even in the business itself – and enables marketers to contribute even more value to the business. Indeed, when you follow the aforementioned best practices, you’re doing more than upskilling your marketing team to reap more insights. You’re democratizing data, which empowers your employees across the business to use data for strategic decision-making; and you’re updating your data stack with modern technologies. In short, investing in upskilling in one area sparks a company-wide shift that brings your company closer to data-driven nirvana.