Data is the foundation to making successful decision-making and optimizations for your advertising efforts. Creating a data-driven culture is crucial if you want success for your business in 2022 and beyond. Marketers and advertisers should strongly consider the following three areas to create a data-driven culture if they want to come out on top.
Make the data the priority
The first trend your business should adopt to transform your organization into a data-driven culture is to make data the #1 priority. Let the data speak for itself, meaning remove the emotion and what you “think” should be done in terms of optimizations and strategy. It’s so valuable to look at the data and data trends to better guide you in your decisions.
It’s important to touch on the old way of holding data “hostage” to a few people at the top of the organization. This strategy doesn’t work anymore. After all, how can all your employees help improve and develop your company if they do not have the data and insights to guide them? Businesses are (and rightfully so) starting to share that data throughout the organization so that everyone can make data-driven decisions.
To piggyback on this point, when I first joined Chacka four years ago, our teams were spending upwards of 40+ hours a week doing manual reporting. This took away from them doing what was needed of them, optimizing performance, and focusing on bigger strategies aimed at growing their accounts. By creating a data infrastructure that focuses on automated reporting, we have cut the need for manual reporting by around 90%! This has allowed our teams to focus on what’s most important which is strategic development and optimizations for our clients. This shared data infrastructure has also opened the door for increased knowledge and trendspotting across teams which has been a game-changer.
Data Harmonization
The second way that advertisers can make a data-driven culture is to create data harmonization. In today’s marketing world, a single companies’ digital footprint is present across various platforms and mediums. Each of those platforms provides the ability to see how that specific channel is performing, but how do we see if all our efforts combined are leading us to our goal? That’s where data harmonization comes in.
Data harmonization is taking data from multiple platforms with sometimes vastly different formats, naming conventions, and columns and combining that data into one cohesive data set. Doing so gives you an omnichannel view of your marketing efforts and provides valuable insights into how your overall marketing strategy is helping you reach your goals. This ties into the third way you can create a data-driven culture – visualizations.
Data Visualization
Data in its raw form can be intimidating and very challenging to quickly communicate any findings from that data unless you’re an experienced data scientist. However, most stakeholders in a company that looks to make business decisions based on data aren’t data scientists, so data visualizations let these stakeholders comprehend vast amounts of data quickly and understand the data better.
Data visualization is about how to present data to the right people at the right time. Visualizations allow you to quickly see trends in data that can lead to more solid business decisions. They also impact the messaging for your audience in a very persuasive way. These data visualizations allow us to easily spot trends, insights, and data outliers and make storytelling incredibly more powerful with visual elements to back up points.
The example below illustrates how a new initiative was introduced into the marketing mix that resulted in a significant lift in conversions and revenue while keeping spend flat. Displaying this visually as opposed to providing the raw numbers has a more profound impact. Adversely, there is a noticeable drop off at the end of the year. What happened there? Did strategy change or is this an effect of seasonality? Both trends were spotted quickly using visualizations!
Final Thoughts
Creating a successful data-driven culture won’t happen overnight but, by making these changes now, you’ll set your business up for success in 2022 and beyond. Remember to follow the three pillars I’ve outlined above: make the data a priority, apply data harmonization across channels, and create data visualization to easily pinpoint trends and outliers.
What other ways do you believe create a successful data-driven culture? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Does your business need help to create visualizations and foster more data harmony across channels? Our team can help – fill out the contact form below and we’ll be in touch shortly.
