Building an effective marketing system for your business requires the building of an effective data model.
But, as the saying goes, “Statistics don’t lie, but you can lie with statistics”. And this is foremost what we must be wary of as we go through our strategic decision making processes. In an internet-driven world, the amount of points of data collection is increasing at a much more rapid rate than ever before. With increased digitization and the growth of the internet of things, there are ever increasing ways to track, capture, and measure various types of activity.
To put it simply, the risk of having big data so readily available to us, is that we will get lost in it. Finding out what matters must be the driving force, as we look to harness the data, to establish meaningful models of operation for our business.
“What matters” is not something that has a definitive answer for each and every business. Indeed, if we are all striving to differentiate ourselves, then there must be differences in what matters to each of us. So if it is not definitive, then it is a model that must be derived to fit our specific situation. The starting point to develop an effective marketing model for your business is start with a clear understanding of your business. Whichever approach or combination of approaches that you use (e.g. Jim Collins Fox-Hedgehog, McKinsey 7S framework, SWOT, to name a few), you must know thyself first. This is the pre-requisite: knowing your specific capabilities and your target buyer’s problems.
Once you have fulfilled your prerequisite, it becomes your guiding criteria to deriving and evolving a marketing model that embodies data that fits the model. Every piece of datum that you choose to include, must tie into the model of behavior that stems from your understanding of your business.
The key data questions are:
-Does the individual datum reflect important or meaningful activity on the buyer’s journey?
-Does the data set provide behavior information that we care about?
So it becomes important, not to get fixated on individual datum. It is not just, the pageviews, just the signups, or just the downloads. Rather it is how all the things that you identify and measure, tie together to complete the journey.
The Moneyball story is a great illustrative example. At the top level, there is a requirement for x number of runs to achieve a certain ranking. Then the breakdown begins. To get x number of runs, it is necessary to get on-base, y number of times. Then it is necessary to get around the bases (i.e. stealing bases, being advanced) with certain achievement levels. And once the model was established, the player recruitment model was re-created to work with the baseball goals.
To create and use data that is effective in advancing your marketing success, you need to focus on building and evolving a marketing model, whose purpose is to deliver the results that you seek. It will no doubt be an iterative process, driven by the questions you ask, and the answers you seek. Keeping your focus on the big picture will allow you to evolve a model that gathers the right data to support itself.