Most marketers already know that data analytics can enable brands to target campaigns more effectively. What’s less known is how best to go from masses of data to actionable insights – there are many schools of thought.
What’s important is that marketers making decisions can see and understand their data – no matter how big it is.
Today, they have access to more data than ever before, and it’s fair to say, more data than they can comfortably handle. One way to help any team, with or without a statistician, is to use data analytics. They can visualise trends and outliers, inform key insights and enable marketers to make better decisions about the direction they want to take their brands.
Visual analytics can help do away with tables of data that are hard to understand. People can actually see trends, even microtrends, over time. This can lead to greater ability to predict what’s going to happen next – allowing marketers to stay ahead of the curve.
But the idea of confronting a world of databases, SQL, and Hadoop is highly unappealing for most marketers. The answer is to embrace technologies that make it easy to explore data even with only a basic understanding of Excel, for example.
Hence, there is a rise of a new breed of data-discovery tools, which Gartner says are becoming the new norm. Data discovery is about people easily exploring their data. They can drag and drop variables that create instant visualizations without a single line of code – or a Ph.D. in statistics.
Digital data can help to provide insights in real-time and help create campaigns that are much more effective and in tune with the opportunity of that very moment. But not for marketers who can’t connect to and understand why that data is important in a flash.
Using past data is a great basis for predicting what might happen in the future. For example, if you are marketing ice cream and you know that you generally sell 50% more ice cream when the temperatures rise, then you know to watch the weather forecast and stock your shelves accordingly. Where predictive analytics don’t do so well are when there are unexpected events – say an especially cold summer – that you just can’t forecast.
And analytics can be used for just about any type of content – even emerging types and sources like video and audio data. Many video and audio technology companies provide ways to monitor data in their platforms and that can in turn be analysed using data analysis software.
For marketers, there’s no excuse not to embrace and leverage data for a more successful business.
By Elissa Fink, CMO of Tableau Software.
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