My friend and coworker Luca Sartoni participated in an AMA on ManageWP where he was asked about using data to guide marketing efforts.

His response explains well why making data-informed decisions will lead to better results than making data-driven decisions:

Interconnecting data science with marketing is one of the keystones of what is commonly called growth hacking. I’m a not a fan of growth hacking by itself though, because business is more complex than just hacking things.

When your decisions are solely based of data science you can call yourself data-driven, but there are tremendous blind-spots. Data looks neutral, but in reality it’s not. The way you plan your data sources, you collect the data, and you process such data to get answers is not neutral and impacts on the final outcome, therefore the information you extract cannot be considered neutral. If you drive your decision-making process solely with that information, your think you are considering data, but in reality you are considering the whole not-neutral process.

For this reason you need to keep in mind more elements when it’s time to make a decision, where data is one of them. There is vision, mission, experience, data, and other elements. When you mix them, giving data the right amount of value, you make a data-informed decision, which is usually better than data-driven, simply because it’s more informed by the other elements.

The whole AMA is worth checking out.