Do Something With Your Marketing: Analytics Documentation

In this week's do something with your marketing, I want you to document your approach for analytics for measuring things when it comes to your marketing. When I say document, I mean you need to be able to explain. I need to be able to explain what I'm measuring, why I'm measuring it, how I'm measuring it, and then what do I do with the information? In data science and machine learning, there's a really well-defined process for approaching the challenges with our data. And that approach, that process is uh your business understanding, your analytical approach, data collection, preparation, analysis, modeling, evaluation, deployment, um, and improvement.

When we deploy data science and machine learning projects, we have to stick with this methodology because it's the only way to make sure that we don't make horrendous mistakes, or if we have made horrendous mistakes in the past, that we don't repeat them. So we do this for data science, we do this for machine learning, we do this for building code to analyze the data problems we have. But we don't do it with our marketing, we don't do it with our marketing analytics, we don't do it with our marketing data. Instead, what tends to happen is uh data regurgitation, uh, where people just kind of take all the data they have and throw it all over the desk, and you're like, wow, that that that's a lot of data. Um what does it mean?

Why what happened? Why did these things happen? What should we do about it? And as such, we don't make use of our data. We don't turn our data into anything useful.

I've had a number of conversations recently with Trust Insights clients about this issue, and fundamentally, yes, there are a number of different challenges, and organizations have different challenges with their data, but it all comes down to the same basic problem. What is your business understanding of the data? How does any given data that you just puked all over the desk, how does it answer key problems for your business? What business problem does this data solve? That's where you have to start when you are documenting your analytics approach, when you're documenting your your marketing methodology.

What business problem are you trying to answer? What are the KPIs that you answer to in your reporting? And then you start building in that analytic approach. What happened? Why did it happen?

What are we going to do about it? Right? Those three steps, those three questions, answering those three questions will solve so many problems that you're having with your marketing, that you're having with your data, that you're having with your analytics. And being able to answer those three questions, for if you count like what's the business point, will do more for your marketing and your analytics than pretty much any software, any tool is going to do. There are enormous numbers of marketing tools and analytics tools and data tools and vendors promising all sorts of things, unicorn poop and all this stuff.

But at the end of the day, if if the tools that you're using don't answer those four questions, what's the business point? What happened? Why did it happen? What are you gonna do about it? Then none of it matters.

I would rather see somebody really dig deep into two or even one metric and be able to answer those questions thoroughly than to have a dashboard with you know blinking lights that looks like the Starship Enterprise and stuff, and you have no idea what's going on, but looks cool, but then you don't make any changes to your business. You don't change what you're doing with your marketing. So this week's Do Something with Your Marketing. I urge you to document your marketing analytics approach by answering those four questions about anything that you're reporting on. What's the business purpose of this number?

What happened with the number? Why did it happen with the number? And what are we going to do about it? If the number went up, great. How do we do more of it?

The number went down and it wasn't supposed to go down. What are you gonna do to fix it? So pick a number. Pick any number that you are responsible for that you and that you need to justify and apply that four-part framework to it. That's this week's do something with your marketing.

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