5 Creative Ways to Use Marketing Data (That Most Brands Haven’t Tried Yet)

I’m an easy mark for life hacks. You know the ones I mean.

• White vinegar removes sweat stains — critical for boy moms.
• Coat your snow shovel in Vaseline so the snow doesn’t stick — essential in snow country.
• Coffee grounds make great fertilizer — even for those of us who can’t keep a cactus alive.

I could go on.

But how about marketing data hacks? The kind that doesn’t involve vinegar or Vaseline but can save your campaign, your creative, or your budget.

There are plenty of best practices for using data. There are far fewer genuinely creative ways to use marketing data, and most of them start with looking past the dashboard and asking what your data can actually tell you.

Here are some worth trying.

1. Use data to see who’s visiting—then ask if they’re the right people

Everyone loves a good CTR, but not all clicks are created equal.

For one CPG brand we worked with, strong click-throughs turned out to be misleading—the people actually landing on the site were younger, lower-income consumers who weren’t in the market for premium products. The impressions looked great on paper but weren’t driving conversions.

When they compared ad data with audience insights, the fix became clear: their real buyers were older and wealthier. Once they started using data not just for targeting, but for storytelling, they could optimize both creative and spend to match the audience that mattered.

The takeaway: don’t just measure volume—measure fit. The right data provider can help you match the “who” behind the clicks with your brand’s ideal audience.

2. Use data to identify your growth audiences

It’s easy to target the obvious group—the one your product was “meant” for. But the magic happens when you look beyond them.

Picture a luxury SUV brand. Conventional wisdom says target well-off families with kids and dogs. But what if your growth audience isn’t them at all? Maybe it’s high-net-worth twenty-somethings buying for badge value instead of cargo space.

With the right data, you can find those audiences, see how they differ (the cat owners shopping at Whole Foods versus the dog owners at Walmart), and craft creative campaigns for each—with minimal overlap.

That’s one of the most powerful and creative ways to use marketing data: not just to reach your core audience, but to uncover the next one.

3. Use data to make the most of major sponsorships

Sponsoring a big event is great—measuring its impact is another story.

Instead of limiting your brand exposure to what happens inside the stadium, think about everything happening around it.

If you’re a financial services brand sponsoring the U.S. Open, for example, you can use addressable audience data to reach attendees before, during, and after the event. Think digital out-of-home on subway routes, mobile retargeting near the venue, or personalized follow-ups once fans are home scrolling through highlights.

You don’t have to just “think outside the box.” Think outside the stadium.

Want more insights into targeting sports fans? We got some insider tips pulled straight from Lotame data. 

4. Use data to build lookalike models—from influencers

Influencer marketing is no longer a side hustle—it’s a main channel. When Unilever announced it would dedicate half its media spend to social channels and boost influencer investment twentyfold, it wasn’t just chasing trends. It was acknowledging a data opportunity.

By analyzing the audiences of key influencers, you can build lookalike models to find new prospects who share similar interests and behaviors.

For instance, if your beauty brand partners with an influencer whose followers binge Netflix rom-coms and period dramas on Prime, those insights can fuel targeting across CTV, social, and even traditional media.

Creative data use starts when you connect the dots between influencer audiences and purchase intent—not just engagement metrics.

5. Use data plus AI to do more than humans can (without another late night in Excel)

AI doesn’t replace marketers—it just handles the grunt work at superhuman speed.

By layering AI on top of your campaign data, you can uncover patterns you’d never spot manually: which audience segments are warming fastest, which creative performs by time of day, or when it’s time to pivot mid-flight.

Think of AI as your most tireless intern—one who doesn’t need caffeine or pep talks.

Together, AI and data can help you optimize mid-campaign, adjust creative messaging, and build smarter follow-up programs after launch. It’s not about working harder; it’s about working with sharper insight and less guesswork.

6. Turn Your Original Data Insights Into Marketing Assets

Here is the use of marketing data that almost nobody gets to, because it does not look like marketing at first: your data is content.

Most brands sit on proprietary data and insights nobody else has: category benchmarks, behavioral shifts, seasonal patterns, audience overlaps that contradict conventional wisdom. That data gets used internally to make decisions and then it dies in a slide deck. Meanwhile the marketing team is commissioning blog posts about topics anyone could write about.

Original data is one of the few genuinely defensible content assets left. It cannot be replicated by a competitor, it cannot be regurgitated by an AI that has never seen it, and it earns links and citations in a way that opinion pieces no longer do.

Four ways to incorporate original data:

Publish a benchmark. Aggregate and anonymize what you see across your customers or your category, and publish it annually. Benchmarks get cited, and citations compound.

Lead with the counterintuitive finding. The most valuable thing in your data is whatever contradicts what everyone in your category assumes. Lead with that, not with the finding that confirms the consensus.

Pitch the data insights for PR. Trade press runs data stories because data stories are cheap to verify and hard to argue with. A single credible statistic with a real methodology behind it outperforms a press release every time.

Turn one dataset into many formats. One analysis becomes a report, a series of social graphics, a webinar, a sales one-pager, and six months of newsletter content. The analysis is the expensive part; the formats are nearly free.

The mental shift is small and the leverage is large: stop treating your data purely as an input to decisions and start treating it as a valuable output you can publish.

What Is Data-Driven Creative?

Everything above uses “creative” to mean inventive aka creative ways to use data. There is a second meaning worth addressing, because it is what a lot of people mean when they search for this: using data to shape the ad creative itself.

Data-driven creative is the practice of using audience, performance, and behavioral data to inform what an ad actually says and shows (the message,  imagery,offer, and format) rather than only who sees it. It sits at the point where media planning and creative development meet, and it is one of the more persistent blind spots in marketing, because the two functions usually sit in different teams, on different timelines, with different data.

The distinction that matters: targeting decides who sees the ad. Data-driven creative decides what they see. Most organizations have invested heavily in the first and barely at all in the second, which is why so many precisely-targeted campaigns still run one generic execution against every segment.

Done well, it changes the work at three levels. Insight, where audience data tells you what your customers actually care about before anyone writes a brief. Production, where creative is built in modular components that can be assembled differently per segment. And optimization, where performance data feeds back into which components win.

None of this replaces creative judgment. It replaces creative guessing about the audience.

How Do I Use Data to Optimize Ad Creative?

If data-driven creative is the idea, here is the practice. Five things that work, in order of how quickly they typically pay off.

Brief from audience data, not from assumptions. Before anyone writes a line, look at what your target audience actually over-indexes on — interests, media consumption, purchase behavior, life stage. Football fans over-index on travel and fine dining. Higher education audiences over-index on premium grocery and automotive intent. These findings change creative direction, and they are usually available before the brief is written and usually ignored.

Build modular, not monolithic. Produce creative in components — headline, image, proof point, offer, call to action — that can be recombined per segment. One shoot, one production cycle, twenty executions. This is the change that makes everything else affordable.

Vary the message by behavioral segment, not by demographic. A first-time visitor and a repeat researcher need different messages far more than a 30-year-old and a 45-year-old do. Behavioral segmentation almost always produces bigger creative lift than demographic segmentation, and almost nobody tests it that way.

Test one variable at a time and give it enough volume. Multivariate tests with thin traffic produce confident nonsense. Pick the variable you think matters most, test it properly, then move to the next.

Close the loop. Creative performance data should flow back into the next brief. Most organizations report on it and then start the next campaign from scratch, which means the same lessons get relearned every quarter.

The uncomfortable finding in most creative audits is that the biggest performance gap is not between good and bad creative. It is between creative that reflects the audience and creative that reflects the brand’s assumptions about the audience.

Connect the Dots: Getting Your Marketing Data Sources Talking

None of this works if your data is scattered across tools that do not talk to each other — which is the situation in most organizations, and the reason so many good intentions about data-driven marketing quietly stall.

The usual state: web analytics in one platform, CRM in another, ad performance split across three or four ad accounts, email in a fifth system, creative performance in a spreadsheet somebody maintains manually. Each tool has a partial view. None of them agrees with the others about how many customers you have.

Getting them connected is less about buying another platform than about deciding three things.

1. What is your source of truth for identity? Every connection problem is fundamentally an identity problem — knowing that the site visitor, the CRM record, the ad click, and the email subscriber are one person. Resolve identity first, because nothing downstream works without it.

2. What actually needs to be joined, and what only needs to be reported next to each other? Not every data source needs deep integration. Be honest about which decisions genuinely require joined data and which just need a shared dashboard. This distinction saves a great deal of money.

3. Who owns the joined view? Integration projects fail on ownership more often than on technology. If no single person is accountable for the connected dataset, it degrades within two quarters.

Once those are settled, the mechanics — orchestration, collaboration environments, clean rooms, warehouse-native activation — are well-trodden. Our guides to data orchestration and data collaboration platforms cover the options.

The tell that you have got it right: you can answer a question about a customer segment in an afternoon instead of scheduling a meeting about which number is correct.

Frequently Asked Questions

The bottom line: data is the fuel—your creativity determines the distance

Every marketer has access to data. The real advantage lies in how you use it.

From diagnosing who’s really clicking, to discovering new growth audiences, to extending sponsorships beyond the event itself—these are the kinds of creative ways to use marketing data that help brands stand out.

So yes, I’ll keep my life hacks. But when it comes to marketing? 

Give me data hacks any day.

Your next great marketing “hack”? Partnering with Lotame to make your data work smarter.