Hunting for Marketing Insights

This month’s HighRoad U topic is near and dear to my heart. As a former economist, I do love my pivot tables, but the marketer in me is the one that loves to ask all those questions and hunt for insights and patterns. Marketers and Analysts will always enjoy hunting for data or information that provide insight into questions such as:

• Why did website visits go up last week?
• Why did blog views drop over the quarter?
• Who downloaded the eBook and then shared the material with colleagues and peers on LinkedIn and what compelled them to do so?
• Who opens emails and reads them in full on their mobile device, and during what time of day?
• Should we continue to pursue paid advertising to drive lift for a campaign?

Data is that double-edged sword – If you have too little, you can’t discover insights that help you move forward – if you have too much, you often feel overwhelmed and are unsure where to start. I love this graphic that our CMO, Suzanne Carawan sketched out because it at once crystalizes the real challenge facing associations today when it comes to data-driven marketing:

With so many systems sitting out there storing data, the challenge isn’t how to get the data, but what data to use. As a marketer, we’re now living in the world we used to dream about – data at our fingertips, but what keeps us up at night now probably is where to even begin in our search for insights.

The HighRoad U series this month was designed to help you start thinking through that framework and providing some direction on what to measure, where to find the data and how to elicit some actionable insights – check out our On-Demand webinar series this month for ideas or inspiration.