When Marketing Becomes Big Data
DATA
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SO WHAT?
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ACTION
When I pitched one of my first contest ideas at Sinclair Broadcast Group—a Halloween display photo contest—I had an annoying salesperson poke a hole in my totally amazing proposal with two words: “So what?”
That phrase chased me for the next three months as I got my feet under me in the new position. Mostly because I had another salesperson who was always willing to get her client, a local pizza chain, to sponsor whatever fun idea I put in front of her. Thank you Anita for always believing in me.
Why wouldn't this jerk just fall in line?
Turns out, he wasn't a jerk. We're actually really good friends now. He was asking a question I hadn't learned to ask yet: What does his client actually get out of sponsoring this contest?
He didn't particularly care about the flashy marketing data. How many impressions the banners received. How many people saw the promotion during the news, at least according to Nielsen. How many likes a Facebook post collected.
His client was spending real money on my fun, mostly digital idea. He wanted to know whether we could connect that investment to potential customers walking through the door. That annoying “So what?” became one of the most useful questions anyone taught me to ask in marketing.
Meaningful Marketing Data
That push for meaningful marketing data changed how I built promotions. In addition to measuring participation, I started thinking more carefully about the information we could collect during the entry process. We also offered optional email opt-ins for participants who specifically wanted future communication from the sponsor.
A contest entry told me someone wanted to win something. Additional information could tell me more about why that person might eventually become a customer. An opt-in was even more interesting. Someone wasn't passively exposed to the sponsor. They were raising their hand and saying, “Yes, you can talk to me again.”
Around this same period, I heard Lutz Finger speak about Big Data at the Second Street Conference in 2015. It gave me language for something I was beginning to experience firsthand: marketers were gaining access to an enormous amount of information.
That amount has only grown. Email subscribers. Website sessions. Impressions. Video views. Form fills. Engagement rates. Search queries. CRM activity. Webinar registrations. Intent signals. LinkedIn analytics.
We can measure an extraordinary number of things. The harder question is figuring out which of those things actually matter.
So What?
That's where marketers can get into trouble. Having 50,000 email subscribers sounds impressive. But how many of them still open your emails?
Getting 100,000 LinkedIn impressions sounds impressive. But who saw the post? Were they existing connections or people outside your network? Did anyone click? Follow? Visit your profile? Start a conversation?
And thank you, by the way, for sticking with me this far into today's article.
None of those numbers are useless. They just aren't the end of the analysis. When managers are pushing us to meet or exceed performance metrics, it's easy to get lost in the allure of Big Data. Bigger numbers look better on a dashboard. They make prettier charts. They give us something concrete to put into a monthly report.
Marketing data becomes much more useful when we ask what the numbers actually tell us.
What did we learn? What changed? What should we do differently because we know this? Every metric should eventually survive the question that annoyed me so much early in my career: “So what?”
Action
Sometimes the answer really does come down to one. One person saw the content we created and filled out the form. One person read the email we spent two hours crafting and asked for a conversation. One prospect watched the clip from the webinar we repurposed for TikTok and thought, “That's exactly the problem I'm trying to solve.”
That doesn't mean reach, impressions, awareness, engagement, or all the other marketing data doesn't matter. Those measurements can help us understand how people move toward that moment, and different campaigns have different jobs.
Collecting data isn't the same thing as doing something useful with it. The most valuable question I've learned to put between the dashboard and the next marketing decision is still the one that irritated me in my twenties: “So what?”
The path shouldn't stop at:
DATA
↓
SO WHAT?
↓
ACTION
Sometimes the smallest number on the dashboard is the person you've been trying to reach all along. Thank you Jeff for always pushing me to dig deeper and find the attribution behind the 'so what'.
