B2B marketers are constantly being asked to do more with less. Smaller budgets. Reduced staff. Not enough hours in the day.
But the amount of data available to us keeps growing. As we are all painfully aware, the digital world produces it at accelerating speeds.
In many cases, already-overwhelmed marketing teams just ignore it. I don’t blame them. Why allocate limited resources to sift through mountains of data? Especially when you’re not sure what insight you’ll gain? The problem is, we know there’s important insight in there. We’re just not sure where.
And upper management is asking marketers to improve marketing campaign performance, glean additional insight about your customers, and demonstrate ROI. To do any of those things, you need more than just experience and intuition. You need the numbers.
So how do you tame big data? Make it more manageable? Make it work for you?
Start by deciding not to tackle all of it. Instead, focus on the data that actually matters. Here are four ways to pare it down.
1. Ask
What are your internal stakeholders looking for? Are they expecting a monthly, quarterly or annual report? Don’t just assume, ask. Know for sure.
Does your CFO only care about ROI? They may be more interested in some of the details. Like how the investment in the new website CMS is playing out. What if they can’t tell you? Put together a sample report and start the conversation there.
2. Align KPIs to business goals
Start with the key business strategies and outcomes your organization is focused on. Is your company focused on growth in a particular market sector? Or are they preparing for an IPO?
Knowing what the business is working toward will help you refine the important metrics and build a data mining plan from there.
3. Track trends
Capturing a specific moment in time usually doesn’t paint a full picture. You’re giving people a snapshot when they really need to see the whole movie.
Data really only tells a story when you are able to look at it over time. Seeing spikes in website traffic right after a major trade show is great. But comparing it to benchmarks from previous years will tell you a lot more.
4. Stand your ground
Once you decide on your key metrics and have a plan in place for tracking them, stick with it.
What happens when others in your organization ask for a different set of data? For instance, the product team wants to know how many followers they acquired on YouTube. Or the sales team is dying to find out how many leads the new white paper garnered.
This is one place where it’s really important to distinguish between strategic and tactical data. You certainly want to accommodate those eager content creators and help them get a better fix on what works and what doesn’t.
But don’t let those tactical data points confuse the issue. Or lessen your focus on your strategic KPIs – the measurements, like share growth or performance in a targeted market segment – that show your performance against business goals.
Those are the things you need to focus on. The things that will cut big data down to size. And win you a friend in upper management.
