Speaking on a panel session at the recent Social Media Week conference that took place in London, Martin Adams, CEO of content marketing AI platform Codec, mentioned that he’d banned his staff from using the term. This elicited a wry smile on my part as I have long tried to avoid talking about data (and “lists” for that matter) when talking about people that form part of a marketing programme or other activity.
Pedantic, perhaps, but the underlying point highlights how we think about the recipients of our carefully crafted messages and creative. Marketing managers, and sales execs too, will frequently say they need “more data” for their campaign or outbound prospecting, when what they really mean is additional precisely targeted recipients for their timely and relevant communications. As such, I prefer the term “audience”. Admittedly, this has a somewhat events or theatrical connotation, but turning back to the dictionary we find that that an audience is a group of people assembled to view a performance, which doesn’t seem so far off beam. Perhaps this is an extension to the old data-information-knowledge-wisdom trope, with “audience” being the next evolution from raw contact data.
Using the term audience also has the effect of humanising the individuals behind the data a little, rather than reducing people to bits and bytes. It’s much easier to imagine the expectant faces of the recipients eagerly awaiting the latest we have to say to them, rather than just a bunch of data. Such audience centricity is at the heart of good marketing communications and naturally leads to the segmentation, personalisation and behaviour triggered activity that is crucial to optimising its effectiveness. Don’t get me wrong, data is still crucial, and close attention should be paid to campaign metrics and commercial outcomes, so that marketing activity can be continuously monitored and improved. That kind of data I will always go the extra mile to deliver to marketers and sales reps.
Which brings me to a recent tweet from Scott Brinker, godfather of marketing technology in his guise as Chief Marketing Technologist and the brains behind the universally recognised Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic. In his Twitter post, Scott asserted his preference for the phrase “evidence-based marketing” over “data-driven marketing”, since “evidence suggests some sort of hypothesis that’s being investigated”. Here I’m a little more equivocal I must admit. As I said in my reply to Scott’s tweet, there’s something about the alliterative “data-driven” that I like; it has a kinetic quality that suggests a certain dynamism in the use of data in marketing.
Having said that, merely driving in the wrong direction is no use at all, however much it might be based on data. “Evidence” certainly evokes a more considered approach to measurable and accountable Marketing – another addition to the data-information et al spectrum? Data should be the basis for evidence and as Scott says, the hypothesis that in turn emerges. And anyway, who says we can’t have both – trains have a locomotive at both ends that pull and push, after all. So here’s to a data-driven, evidence lead and audience centric marketing future. Data is dead, long live data!
