There are often two schools of thought in SaaS marketing. There are the data nerds that love the analytics. And there are the folks who can create brilliantly novel ideas. There are nerdy Michael Burrys. There are creative Don Drapers. In my experience, successful marketing – especially with the constraints of smaller SaaS platforms – is a dance between both.

I feel like a pretty creative person, but more often than not, it’s data that tells me where to focus that creativity.

A great example of this was when I started supporting the AthleteReg team a few months ago. Their marketing manager was doing amazing work, but she had never really been given much in the way of direction. So, one of the first things we did was dig into the data. I knew if we could get a better idea of a few, core metrics – conversion rate, average revenue per user, existing search demand, etc. – each one would give us a little more clarity around where she should invest her time and talents.

For example, once we found the conversion rate of their sales page, we saw that it was below what I’d expect for a platform like theirs.

So we focused our creativity onto trying to improve conversion rate with a rewrite/redesign.

Once we knew average revenue per user, we could back into how many new users we needed to hit our goals and, in turn, how many visitors it would take based on our conversion rate compared to current traffic levels.

So we’ve been brainstorming ways to get more traffic from more channels to help hit that number.

Once we had a rough idea of search volume for our main keywords from Google Search console, we knew this could be a good building block toward our goal.

So we spend a couple days getting copy and taglines together for a paid search campaign.

Once we started to get a rough idea of what our marketing budget would be, we know how much would have to come from low- or no-cost channels.

So we’re now focusing our efforts a little more on free traffic than paid.

But there’s one extra benefit to data, especially for smaller SaaS companies, that is especially helpful: Data also tells you HOW MUCH creativity you can justify putting into one project.

Salesforce may spend millions on a new homepage design because the upside of a small increase in conversion is measured in the tens of millions, but we’re not Salesforce. With AthleteReg, we modeled out the impact of various conversion rate changes at various levels of traffic to understand what, say, a 25% increase in conversion would translate to in terms of revenue. That was a meaningful number but definitely not measured in millions, so we had to be a little scrappy with some in-house talent to pull it off.

In other words, data tells you where the opportunities are, creativity helps you capitalize on them. You can have all the data in the world but never grow unless you come up with ways to improve those metrics. Likewise, you can be an bottomless well of creativity but never put it on the things that matter without data to point you in the right direction.

It’s not an either/or, you’ve gotta have both.