1.7 Turning Marketing Data into Marketing Insights

Having access to great marketing analytical data does not equal knowing how to use that information to improve your marketing targeting, messaging, or engagement. The data you will receive from marketing dashboards or campaign reports is accurate but never comes with a detailed explanation for WHY. The click-through rate may be lower than your average . . . but why? The engagement score for a certain organic post you released last week might be double your normal metrics . . . but why? Having detailed information about what is happening with ads, posts, webpage visits, and form-fills is fantastic. But knowing what to do next? That is going to take some work.

The most valuable tool in your marketing arsenal for turning data into insight is deep customer knowledge. The more you know about your core customers—your best customers—the better you will be at interpreting the data correctly. Think about a time when you badly misread someone’s text, post, or body language. You know, that one time when you thought the message meant one thing, but you found out later that the sender of that communication actually meant something totally different? It is likely that this miscue occurred because of either a lack of context or the sender and receiver didn’t really know each other well enough to bridge the limitations of that message type.

In marketing, we call this process of learning about and describing our target customers as creating buyer (or customer) personas and mapping out their journey (their customer journey) as a process that requires a series of communication and experiential touchpoints.

This course does not delve into how those customer personas or journeys are developed, but learning how to understand that available marketing data becomes much easier when you are working with a deep understanding of your target audience and best customers.

Another helpful tool to correctly interpret marketing analytics is the use of different platform reporting tools or metrics in concert. Think of an empty X/Y axis.

Now, place one data point anywhere on that graph. What do we know? The short answer is that other than the exact location of that piece of data, we know very little. Now add a second point, and a third, and twenty more. Now what do we know? Is the data telling a story now? Can you spot a trend line? How about a range of values between “Very Bad—OK—Very Good”? With multiple data points that begin to align or agree with each other, it becomes possible to find valuable trends or insight, where before you simply had a single point of information.

In my marketing efforts over 30 years, I have found that a good rule of thumb to find consumer insight from any source is to keep testing, asking new questions, or asking the same questions of different people until I begin to hear the same answers, until I begin to see a trend in the responses. That’s when I know that I’ve crossed the line from data into insight. Having similar results or findings come from a variety of sources gives some pretty compelling evidence that the information is valid and actionable. The next step is learning to translate those insights into action.