A good marketer needs to be comfortable working with data. In my view, it’s a key attribute that turns a marketer and their marketing plan from being average, to being effective and successful.
But for most marketers, data isn’t their natural happy place; it can be intimidating, confusing and easy to get hopelessly lost in.
So, here are some helpful tips to working with data while staying focussed and clear-minded, allowing marketers to build confidence and skill working with data, developing into data-led, effective marketers.
- Be super clear on what your businesses’ overarching Objective is. At the end of the day, this is the star on the hill. If you can build an effective marketing plan that contributes towards this Objective, and you’re able to demonstrate that correlation, you’ve done your job, and you’ve done it well, better than most marketers in fact.
- In whatever way works for you and the way your brain works, visualise/design your data hierarchy, from Objective and Key Results all the way down to ad platform metrics such as impressions and clicks. This will become your map to scale back up to the Objective if you start to lose the thread of your data task.
- Be clear on your customer journey as this should relate to the data hierarchy, and reminds us to think about the data with a human view. It’s an important lens to look at the data through as rather than simply being able to state a data finding, you’ll be able to start unearthing, or finding more questions around a customer behaviour insight. This is where the marketing gold lies.
- Ask yourself very specific questions, write them down and plan how you will answer them. I.e. which metrics do you need to look at and combine together? Which platforms will you need to look at? Which date ranges will you need to pull data for?
Thinking ahead with as much detail as possible will allow you to get in, pull your data, work with it and come out with a clear answer faster, without losing your marbles in the process.
- Ensure you’re very clear on how the data variables you’re using are defined. What do they actually mean, which point in a customers’ journey are they reflective of? What are the limitations of using that data parameter i.e. is there a date field or purchase type that they can’t be combined with. Working with other experts in the business to educate yourself on data parameter definitions will allow you to use them correctly in your analyses, rather than making a mistake you may not realise until later, when someone else looks at your work and notices the error. This can create frustrating rework not to mention can be uncomfortable.
- Always run a common-sense check. Are there any data that look ‘off’, too high/low or big/small compared with the total possible number? Are there any null figures or conversion rates that don’t look right? If so, double check your reports to ensure all your date ranges are consistent, and any other filters or report settings are as you intended. If unsure, have a second pair of eyes look for you to see if they notice anything that you were too close to see.
- Finally, be unashamedly curious and willing to ask questions. There’ll be data points you don’t understand. There’ll be analyses you don’t feel comfortable conducting. There’ll be dashboards you don’t know how to build or excel formulas and shortcuts you’ve never done before. That’s all OK! No-one knew how to do that until they did it for the first time and then kept practising. They would’ve been shown how to do it, learnt it in a course or found a YouTube video or article and followed it step by step. We all have to start somewhere and be unafraid to ask for help, admit we don’t know the how, or the answer and then build from that honest foundation into knowledge and experience over time.