Data – not waving but drowning
Written by Harry Bott
Moore’s law famously stated that every two years processor speeds would double, and the costs for the processing power would halve. All these increases in processing power created an explosion in ‘big data’ that shows no sign of stopping.
While data is everywhere in any business, it only becomes useful when we can change it into information. Actionable intelligence – insight – that lets us make changes in our processes and drive the business forward.
One area where data proliferates is in the marketing department. Alongside leaps in processing power, was the whole digital marketing wave. Every marketer is now expected to know what’s going on with their SEO, PPC, emails, web presence, social media activity… And with the current trend of marketing and sales departments becoming integrated, the savvy marketer needs to know how the sales team is performing too; there’s no point generating all those leads if there’s no follow up.
Phone calls are a vital part of the sales and marketing mix, and there’s a lot of data generated there, too.
As a result, it can feel like you are drowning in data. How do you make sense of what is driving your business? It’s easy to see what online activities generated online results, but far harder to see what online activities generate offline results such as an excited prospect calling you to buy your product or service.
How can you get to the bottom of important information about best performing campaigns, channels, adverts and digital marketing programs without getting swamped? It’s a careful balance between having the detail and seeing top line information, simply presented.
Here at Mediahawk we understand this. Naturally we collect the detail. Integrated with your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, we also link in to your other marketing tools and sales CRMs such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Optimizely, and more.
However, reporting on the outcomes from your activities and attributing results is easy. With secondary dimensions, click-to-drill-down reports, and simple to read dashboards you can schedule to your inbox each day, changing the large quantities of data your business generates into insight and actions happens without effort.
Being able to pivot data, see things from a new angle, yet retain the wider context, is the key to continually improving your marketing campaigns.