6 Great Uses For 'Where It Is' Data
Photo by Sidney Pearce on Unsplash
Greetings From the D.L. Menard School Of Marketing!
One of the many things you may not know about me is that I’m an unabashed fan of Cajun music.
In fact, the sole reason I bought an accordion was so I could perfect the solo riff on Johnnie Allan’s cover of Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land.” (A classic tune, folks. So tell me again, why wasn’t there more public weeping and wailing when Chuck Berry and Fats Domino died last year?)
It started when I was an assistant editor on the record-collecting magazine Goldmine. All the little Cajun labels would send us records for review, and since no one else wanted them, they came home with me.
It wasn’t all shrimp ‘n’ grits, let me tell you.
Among the lot was Cajun and Swamp Pop Super Hits, which contained not only the execrable “Cajun Rap Song,” but a Cajun cover of Ray Stevens’ “The Streak” – though I have to say, hearing Stevens’ opportunistic narration executed in unintelligible Cajun French is a vast improvement over the deathless original.
Anyhow, one of the records that found its way to me was No Matter Where You At, There You Are by D.L. Menard, the “Cajun Hank Williams.” It’s a good album, not Menard’s best, but the title has always stuck with me.
It’s actually the perfect title for a very useful way of looking at the effectiveness of your marketing program.
“There are two ways of looking at your marketing performance: Where it is and where it’s going.”
Basically, there are two ways of looking at your marketing performance – where it is and where it’s going.
If this rings a bell, and the name of that bell is “The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,” yep. You can pinpoint an object’s location or its velocity – not both.
So bring that over to marketing. Lots of marketers, me included, love to focus on movement, direction, changes in benchmarks over time, and it’s true – you can learn a huge amount about marketing performance by looking at direction.
In many respects, direction is easy. Plot it on a graph. Look at whether the graph is moving up or down. Draw a conclusion, change a variable, measure again.
Very scientific, very rational, good stuff.
Compared to that, static measurements are a little harder, a little more oblique.
If you’re just given a number, a raw score, a survey result without the context of time, how can you tell what it means?
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash.
Here are some things you can do with that “where it is” data:
- Create a snapshot of your organization. Look at the various things you measure across your organization. How do they interrelate? Instead of looking at one set of data across time, look across data sets and see relative volumes. How are your search metrics compared to your social-media numbers? How are repeat sales stacking up against CSAT data? These are the relationships you tend to miss when you’re strictly looking down the line.
- Normalize your data. Mess around; try to put everything on an even footing. What does that look like? Even if you eventually crumple up the piece of paper or delete the spreadsheet, it’s always worthwhile to try to make everything play together.
- Examine qualitative measures. Numbers change every second; what people say has a little more permanence. Also, what people say is much more evocative of a place and time, lending depth and nuance to an otherwise duotoned snapshot.
- Compare your data to others’. Industry data is often less longitudinal than your own. It’s always useful to take a moment and see how your data is stacking up against the industry. Look for points of diversion and points of correlation, and try to figure out what they mean. Again, always a useful exercise.
- Give it the ol’ smell test. What seems wrong or off? Everyone wants to be seen as data-driven; no one wants to claim that they play the hunches. Well, if ever there was a time to play the hunches, this is it.
- Resist the urge to change things. Because this is a snapshot of a moment in time, trying to change it is futile. That train has already left the station.
Like D.L. says, no matter where you at, there you are. Accept that … but keep trying to figure out what it means.