I know a bit over-dramatic, but for most marketing teams this is a sad truth. They have data all around them but it’s worthless.
They are almost literally drowning in it.
What’s the strategy?
So often I see companies that don’t have an apparent analytics strategy and they think that collecting data will save them. They randomly collect data from various metrics because they can or because it sounds like something important, but they really don’t have a cohesive plan for what they want to accomplish. Or better said, they don’t have a clear idea what they want their customers to accomplish when they visit the company website, interact with them on social media, or how marketing campaigns should actually equate to more sales.
Chart and Tables and Graphs, oh my!
Many marketers create a spreadsheet with a ton of metrics to show this went up or this went down. But what does it really mean? The numbers satisfy the desire to report progress and inevitably you can find something that says “Hey we accomplished something!” This quite frankly is the definition of a ‘data puke”.
But in order to keep the doors open, the numbers need to be related to the bottom line.
Instead of creating data and then deciding what to do with it, marketing departments need to decide what to do first and then determine which data they need to show if their efforts were successful or not. If you do this it will give you a much better chance of tracking and proving that their marketing is actually accomplishing something.
Create a strategy that matches with the overall company goals, and collaborate with your sales team, operations, and other departments to understand the full life cycle of a client. This is the first step to creating useful data.
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