Data Is Everyone’s Domain
April 7, 2011
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Earlier this year I contributed a guest post at Copyblogger on the fact that copywriters need to understand data. Their editors had a little fun with my headline (they threw in the “get out of the business” bit) but they have a point. Copywriters who aren’t data driven may soon find demand for their skills fade.
Today I was thinking a bit more about fluency in data and I think it’s even broader. Basically, in any facet of marketing, media or PR data is everyone’s domain. The fact that you can now easily get feedback on your activities, to not do so is to ignore a powerful mechanism to improve.
What I think is especially funny (or concerning) is that people still think digital is hard to measure. I always almost fall out of my chair when I hear that. Digital is easier to measure, you just need to understand what metrics matter and have the right tools setup at the start.
Let me throw some questions at you:
- What have you done to improve your website conversions this month?
- Do you even know what % of your website visitors convert to sale or lead?
- Which of your online marketing tactics provided the most return last month?
- What was your most successful piece of content created last month? How do you know?
- How many (and how effective) were the organic shares of your blog content last month?
Did you know all the answers? If yes, awesome, you’re probably an analytics Jedi (go make friends with Avinash if you aren’t already). If no (or someone on your team doesn’t know) you should bring them up to speed.
There are too many potential tactics and ideas you could implement digitally. It is actually what you don’t do that defines your digital marketing success. And data is the key to understand what’s working and what’s not.
You can’t consistently improve results or be at all strategic in your marketing and PR if you don’t know what’s producing, (and why) how to report results meaningfully to make a case for more budget and iterate/refine.
image credit: Suto Norbert Zsolt from Shutterstock
Josh Braaten replied | Apr 7, 2011 (31 comments)
You’re singing my song, Adam. I’m a friend of data (and Avinash) and it appalls me how many decisions are still being made on a) a whim b) a HIPPO or c) because something is believed to be cool.
Marketing and PR is at an interesting crossroads. Many of the leaders made their way through the ranks in the era of push and pray. Some of these folks struggle with adopting digital concepts and, as a result, fail to cultivate a data-driven culture. If the boss doesn’t care about data, why should the average employee?
What do you think the root cause to data aversion is? Is it a lack of passion to find the answer? A lack of knowledge on how to find the data? A lack of appreciation and top-down embracing of data? Something else?
Paul Bennett replied | Apr 8, 2011 (7 comments)
Great post.
Most organisations I’ve worked in have ample access to data and, usually, spend at least some time a month producing a report for senior management to skim over.
The real issue is not access to that data, as between google analytics, webtrends, nielsens etc you have all the data you’ll ever need. The real issue is being willing to take time to do more with the data than produce a report that shows your pageviews slightly increasing every month (and yes, I’ve worked in places where others have fudged the figures or ignored inconvenient data so the report would look good).
Getting out of “to-do list” mode and taking time to understand what the data is telling you and then using it to inform content creation, measure audience engagement and (shock horror) perhaps to even remove some of the “sacred cow” content areas of the site that people don’t care about or which are costing the business to maintain but aren’t performing. This is where the data really starts informing business decisions.
Website analytics are the most overlooked area for business improvement and hold an absolute goldmine of data. Laziness and fear, in my opinion, are the only things stopping us from harnessing their full power.