“Permission to treat the witness as hostile?”. It’s a well-worn phrase in legal dramas. A hostile witness is one who testifies against the party who has called. Leaving aside the legal nuances and implications, this is a marketing newsletter after all, it’s an interesting concept to apply to data driven marketing.
While we’re not going to dispute that marketing has been revolutionised by data – sharing new views into customer journeys, tactical performance, or delivering strategic insights. While data was meant to end the debate on right and wrong, instead we have become so focussed on data that we’re missing the real story, and the road to results.
There’s a few reasons this approach, while often well intentioned, can land marketers in a sticky situation.
- ⏰ Data shows a moment in time, not the reason why – your reporting data is backwards looking, it shows what happened in a particular time frame. Not why it happened. Making decisions for Q3 purely on Q2 data could lead to poor decision making. As they say in investing, past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
- 📉 We don’t always interpret data correctly – there’s three types of averages, each one could lead to a different conclusion. While some marketing teams are lucky enough to be backed by agencies with data teams, or in-house strategy teams, who can help them get to the core of data, tackling this skills gap is proving difficult.
- 👿 Data gathering is subject to human error – missing tags, wrong classifications, UTM mistakes…marketing data is rife with mistakes and miscalculations. That all comes through into your reporting. It’s also way too easy to be selective with which data is used.
Importantly, this isn’t about spinning the truth. Or keeping stakeholders happy with diplomatic decks. That’s not going to make your marketing better, or lead to true data driven marketing. Indeed, more often than not data is inconsistent, incomplete and error-prone. So let’s stop leading with data as a single source of truth, and take a different approach.
To peel back the lid, and understand what’s really going on with our marketing data, try treating it as a hostile witness.
Instead, stop thinking of data as your friend all the time. Interrogate it, and see if it can make you a better marketer.
- Ask questions, a lot of questions. Good questions, bad questions. It doesn’t matter. For every data point try and get to the story behind it, understand what’s happening and why.
- Increase the frequency of your reporting, ideally with live dashboards. Know what your data looks like on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. When does your traffic seem to peak?
- Treat your marketing like an experiment – if you increase xyz, what results would you expect to see? What actually happened and why? If you want to get to your goal of x, what routes could you take?
- Interrogate multiple data sources separately – while a single place to view your data is essential, too much consolidation can obfuscate what’s going on. Taking a channel, product or journey stage view can be helpful. Do they all tell the same story?
Importantly remember to make the data work for you, you don’t work for the data.
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