Actionable Marketing Insights: Finding the “So What?” in Big Data
Earlier this week, I wrote about a question that annoyed me early in my career: “So what?” I was pitching sponsorship ideas at Sinclair Broadcast Group and thought the impressive part was everything we could deliver. Impressions. Promotion. Television exposure. Digital engagement. One salesperson kept asking what his client would actually get out of it.
Around the same time, I attended the Second Street Conference in 2015 and heard Lutz Finger speak about Big Data. I already had one of our biggest promotions of the year almost ready to launch: Cruze Into Summer. The prize was a two-year lease on a Chevy Cruze.
We were expecting a lot of attention from people who wanted to win a car versus a smaller prize like a free pizza. That would give us plenty of data, but what were the actionable insights from that data?
After hearing Finger speak, I started thinking about what we could ask during the entry process that would actually be useful. There was an enormous difference between someone saying, “Sure, I'd like a free car for two years,” and someone saying, “I'm planning to buy a car in the next three to six months.”
So I asked. I added survey questions to the contest entry process that helped us understand where people were in the car-buying process. I also gave participants the option to raise their hands and say they wanted to hear from the sponsor about future offers.
Once the promotion launched, those entries could tell us more than how many people wanted a free car. Some could identify potential customers the sponsor could actually follow up with.
Actionable Marketing Insights
Suddenly, thousands of contest entries weren't just thousands of contest entries. Some of those people were potential customers.
That was the part Sales could actually do something with. It changed the way I thought about marketing data because the biggest number wasn't necessarily the most interesting one.
A promotion could generate thousands of entries, a social post could reach thousands of people, or an email list could contain thousands of addresses. Those numbers tell us something about reach.
They don't automatically tell us what to do next. The smaller group might be more useful: the people who clicked, answered a particular question, opted in, requested more information, or demonstrated that they had a problem your product could solve.
This lesson feels even more relevant now. We have access to more marketing data than I could have imagined sitting in that Second Street conference a decade ago. LinkedIn gives me impressions, members reached, profile activity, follower demographics, and how much of my audience came from outside my network. Marketing platforms can track entire journeys across channels.
The Allure of Big Data
I love data. I will happily disappear into a spreadsheet looking for patterns. The useful part isn't having all those numbers, though. It's figuring out which number changes what you do next.
DATA
↓
SO WHAT?
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ACTION
Cruze Into Summer taught me that the person entering because a free car sounds awesome and the person entering because they're planning to buy a car soon may look exactly the same in the participation total. You have to ask another question to see the difference.
That might be my favorite lesson from Big Data: The most important number isn't always the biggest one. It's the one that helps you decide what to do next.
