Marketing teams are facing greater pressure than ever to be data-driven. According to Oracle, 92% of CMOs want to be data-driven in how they quantify the value of both their marketing spend and their contribution to the organisation.
The future of marketing strategy and execution lies in data. However, with growing numbers of data sources, and departments within companies creating data silos, gaining insights from data has never been tougher.
Reporting often involves too much data. Data that is not useful and difficult to understand leaves you unable to take valuable insights and apply them to your strategy from your reporting.
So how can your marketing team adapt and become data-driven?
There is a smart solution to this dilemma. In this post, we will discuss a simple three-step process that you can use when reviewing your marketing reports to ensure that you find the most valuable data to drive your strategy.
When overwhelmed by the volume of data you have, the first step is to be clear on what data really matters to your marketing team.
From a data visualisation perspective, you also need to look at whether the data you have is presented in a clear or confusing way.
Data visualisation is a valuable tool in data-driven marketing. You can clarify your data and ensure only the vital data that is relevant to your campaigns is present.
Take your current marketing reports. Go through them and highlight clear and understandable data in green. Then highlight confusing data in red.
Once you have gone through your entire marketing report you can assess whether it is too complicated and confusing for the data to be useful. If so, it may be time to move on to another report and start the process again.
Once you find a marketing report that is easy to understand, you can move on to the next step.
Step two means it's time to examine the clear data from your marketing report. What are you examining it for? To see if it is not only clear but also interesting.
Simply because your marketing data is easy to digest does not mean that it is valuable and interesting. To establish whether your data is interesting, you can ask yourself these questions:
Once you have found your interesting data, you can move on to the final step.
The final step involves making sure you can tell a good story from your data.
You can ask yourself:
Can you compare your data to other data that creates interesting correlations?
Is this a story your audience has not heard before?
Valuable insights need to be shown from your data to be able to create an engaging story. The best stories from data are those that are unexpected. If your data shows a correlation or outlier that will pique interest because it has not been seen before, then follow this narrative.
When telling your data’s story you need to think more like a marketer than a data analyst. Present your story in a way that will engage your audience. Think about who your audience will be, whether it will be your internal audiences such as your executives or your customers. Show them your data in a compelling way, and use it to influence the change you want to see.
If your data insights are not understood, no one will act on them and they become obsolete.
Data-driven marketing is more important than ever. But with more data becoming available, it's getting harder to find the valuable pieces that you can use to build a more effective marketing strategy. The key is to not be overwhelmed and take a logical approach to finding data in your marketing reports. You also need to accept the fact that you may review many reports that end up being useless because they are too confusing.
By using our 3 step guide you can quickly assess which marketing reports are worth your time and create engaging data-driven stories for your marketing.
See inspirations here:
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