Tools for the Team: Digital Marketing
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” These words by W. Edwards Deming – American engineer, statistician, professor, among many other pursuits – never rang truer. In today’s digital-first world, data is everywhere, and organizations savvy enough to tap into this digital gold are positioned to present, deploy, and demonstrate value across business operations. According to BI surveys, the use of internal and external data is on the rise across industries, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down.
In the world of strategic communications, data serves as both the bookends and bookmarks of the strategic planning process, from strategy development, targeted execution, and tracking progress against target goals.
The initial strategy development phase is the most critical, as this strategic direction sets the stage for every following step in the campaign. The more informed the initial strategy, the more likely the campaign is to succeed. Informed data can take many forms, depending on whether you’re developing data-driven persona profiles, tracking and reacting to consumer trends, specific target market research, mapping industry influencers, working on brand reputation reparation, or managing a crisis communications situation.
The stream of data and information is everywhere. In fact, there is just too much. The craft is knowing what questions need answering, tying that against data sources that are available, understanding how that data can be exported, merged and manipulated, and how it will all tie back to the overarching strategy.
Once you identify the campaign data needs, map out all available data sources you’ll want to tap into, whether that’s from:
Public sources, including Google Trends, U.S. Census data, Nielson, PEW Research, etc.
From owned sources, including Google Analytics, media monitoring platforms (Cision, Sprout Social), Google Alerts or Feedly, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or marketing automation platform, customer surveys, etc.
From paid sources, think Omnibus surveys, paid online polls, or third-party data providers.
Many of these data sources can be explored and manipulated within each platform, helping address burning questions or uncover unexpected insights and data points in real time. Other platforms will require additional analysis leveraging a Tableau-like big data analysis platform, requiring data modeling and visualization considerations. These data needs and analysis efforts need to be weighed against available bandwidth, budget, and timeline to determine the most appropriate course of action, but at least with that data, you can be confident in the data-driven direction you take.