For business growth and marketing teams, there is an ever expanding plethora of information available – so much so, that there are times when knowing where to start with it becomes an overwhelming task, let alone sewing it firmly into your team culture.
Having a team that is religious in not only tracking, but going further to analyse and make decisions based on data can have a direct positive impact on a business’s ability to innovate, achieve a high rate of workforce engagement and profitability.
Have clear KPIs
Every business should have a set of critical metrics that bring clarity to its overall business strategy; these could range from customer numbers, monthly revenue or conversion from prospects to customers or other relevant KPIs suitable for your business.
Along with the business KPI’s, each department and every project that is carried out within the business should also begin with a clearly defined set of KPIs to ensure that both your strategies and team remain focused and productive. Analyse the tasks that are involved in achieving the set goals and create a proactive approach to overcoming any obstacles that could inhibit the rate of productivity.
In relation to a marketing department, the KPI’s could be further broken down into content and reach to be measured on details such as email newsletter click through rates, most popular blogs and bounce rate (content); inbound links, keyword rankings and social media shares (reach).
Analytics
The right tools and analytical software are there to be able to streamline, consolidate and support the way that your data is accumulated, measured and analysed, making it a more efficient and user-friendly process.
There are many analytics tools available that help you measure all areas of marketing and business growth and increase the impact of your efforts. Many of the social platforms come with built in analytic tools as do email marketing channels and of course, google analytics owns over half of the market when it comes to web analytics – There is also a range of data driven tools available for businesses to implement.
Businesses should have a unified view over data right across the business, outdated ‘data silos’ can provide teams with fragmented and disconnected information. By combining all of the data from each of the tools into a CRM system, you help every team within the business to have data enabled interactions as well as being able to truly report on ROI.
The Team
Big data is practically useless if you don’t have the staff that will incorporate it into effective decision making. Data driven teams should be a mix of analytical, creative and curious individuals that combine their skills to produce high quality, reliable and engaging collaborations. A competent data driven member of the team should have a natural affinity for business and data, and ought to strive to understand the data and the way that it represents the business.
Teams that go ahead after analysing the data, and make informed decisions that transform into customer value will do so, not only on the core data but on the risks and that it poses and on any correlation between the data. Fundamentally, the data collected should answer a question related to the KPI’s, e.g., is the content marketing generating a monthly revenue? The answer should be a simple, yes or no – when the answer is decided, the next question should be ‘why’, this will be able you to drill right down to the core of the analytics.
There should be strong leadership within data driven teams; leaders that endeavour to expose each team member and educate them on how it should be analysed and interpreted.
As analytical tools and algorithms are consistently evolving and adapting, it is vital that a data driven team is proactive and curious when it comes to seeking the most valuable and reliable insights. Continued training in the form of relevant courses, conferences and webinars is good practice along with in-house team learning sessions to ensure that everyone is on the same page, questions should be encouraged from all levels.
Visual Data
It’s so important that the data that is collected is communicable to humans; it needs to be sophisticated yet easily digestible. While software designed to collect data has become highly developed, tools that make it accessible and digestible have evolved at a slower pace, offering great displays rather than great insights.
Data visualisation is a cognitive science; Our brains do not perform well when required to understand complex statistics, but they do respond well to simply visual displays such as mapping or charts in a simple format; meaning that we are able to suddenly pick out relationships and anomalies between key pieces of data that we wouldn’t see if the data was displayed as a spreadsheet full of numbers.
Shapes, colour and graphic patterns pay a large part in our ability to almost effortlessly process data at a subconscious level, called pre-attentive processing; Information Dashboard Design is a book that gives a much further insight into the visual communicate of data.
Data driven business strategies have opened up an age of truly customized marketing. This ‘big data’ is business critical as it will give you the means to pinpoint specific and common traits in your audience and use them to target those with similar characteristics for a higher ROI. It will allow you to also become further effective and efficient because user-generated data will tell you when they will respond and the channels that they are most likely to respond to. Using these insights will open new doors for your business and there are plenty of stories that will support the transformational effect that data can have and inspire you to start analysing immediately.
