Humanizing Data Series - Step Three: Embrace Data as a Decision-Making Tool

Data can answer a lot of mission-critical questions for your business and become a huge decision-making tool for your brand's success. Embracing this fact can lead to several important questions that get the ball rolling: Why did we choose this goal for our campaign? What does that goal mean in numbers? How do we track against it in terms of media venues, web, CRM, or other sources? And who will be responsible for tracking? The agency, the client, or the data analytics partner?

Data is a Great Decision-Making Tool, When Handled Carefully

Seriously considering the answers to these questions is a great start. It's also crucial to setting yourself up for success with your data and the story it tells. Brand marketing won’t ever deliver the same performance, reach or success in every DMA location, or every media channel. Unfortunately, more often than not, leadership views a strategy or a media venue holistically. If social isn’t delivering engagement and sales are down in the Midwest (or any number of other broad-brush assessments by leadership), it’s very easy for ill-advised budget cuts or re-allocations to be made. But when data is collected, collated, and presented well, it can provide direction for ultimate decision-making. This allows you to deliver greater focus and dollars on the things that work.

Catch up on Step One: You Have to Commit and Step Two: Data Visualization, Understood

A data model, for instance, that blends website traffic, sales figures, and plots against the population in a given geo-location or market can deliver insights into both consumer user ratios (how many residents are engaging with our media tactic) and conversions in the form of sales transactions or brand engagements within the total number of users. And using data to monitor ratios can shape tactical implementation.

In a market where the conversion ratio is higher than a campaign goal, tactics can be better realigned around brand awareness generation. In other markets where the user ratio beats expectations, dollars and efforts can be switched over to conversion-focused media messaging and channels. Using data to paint this picture doesn’t just help across-the-board, knee-jerk reactions to general market conditions in companies that lack data analytics maturity, it establishes a working, proven protocol for decision-making solely by what the numbers show.

Valuable Effects of Data as a Decision-Making Tool

Using data can provide valuable insights and information that can be used for making informed business decisions. Some of the impacts that using data for business decisions can have are:

1. Improved Decision-making: Data can help businesses make more informed decisions based on insights gathered from large volumes of information. This can help businesses to identify trends, opportunities, and risks more quickly and accurately
2. Increased Efficiency: By using data, businesses can streamline their decision-making processes. It also reduces the time and resources needed to gather and analyze data
3. Competitive Advantage: Access to insights and information provided by data can give businesses a competitive advantage. It enables them to make faster, more informed decisions than their competitors
4. Better Customer Experiences: Data can provide insights into customer behavior and preferences. This allows businesses to tailor their products and services to meet the needs of their customers better
5. Improved Profitability: By making more informed decisions, businesses can reduce costs, optimize resources, and identify new revenue streams, improving profitability

Next Step to Humanizing Data

The next step to humanizing data is Step Four: Data Must Deliver Clarity. If you have any issues with implementing this with your own data, we're ready to hop in and help!