Do Something With Your Marketing: Answer the Three Whats

In this week's Do Something With Your Marketing, want to impress upon you a lesson. Analysis without action is a meal you cook but never eat. I'm going to be giving a talk this coming week at uh the marketing props B2B form on how to make great dashboards for marketers. Or anybody really. Nobody listens to me.

Nobody follows my recommendations. Nobody uh nobody does things differently. Well, why is that? It's because when you do the analysis, that's only one-third of the work. There are three what's, and again, this is a linchpin of the talk.

There are three what's for every report and infographic and slide deck and dashboard and whatever that you perform as a data-driven marketer. It's a data-driven anything. What happened? So what? Now what?

When we do the analysis and we hand over the analysis, and it's got our great charts, and we've done our linear regressions, and we've done our trends and forecasts and time series forecasts and driver analysis, all of that is good. It's important. You can't do anything else if you don't know what happened. But we can't stop there. What happened is pouring data on somebody's desk.

So now the question is, so what? What does it mean? Why is it important? Why did these things happen? Our our forecast says that our website traffic's going to be up 15% in the next year.

So what? If we can fix the 1% conversion rate in sales, um, we could have our best year ever. Oh, okay. Let's do that. Let's let's fix that.

Because uh, yeah, man, doubling our revenue? I'm on board, right? So there's a so what? And then the third part is now what? What is the plan of action?

How are we going to turn this analysis and this insight into action? When you look at a dashboard or a report or a slide deck or a PowerPoint or listen to a podcast or watch a video, ask those three questions. What happened? So what? Now what?

And if you can't answer the questions from what you're looking at, there's a good chance that the analysis is not done. Now, if you are the person doing the analysis, you now have the framework that you need in order to make that analysis a lot more valuable. If you are the person who is receiving that analysis, you can now push your colleagues, your team, your people, to the next level, to the level of this is what's going to make your hard work more valuable. This is how you're going to feel like you're making an impact. If you, as a practitioner, feel like, man, you know, I I I work 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and I just don't feel like I'm my work means anything.

It's probably because your work doesn't mean anything in the sense that you haven't done all three what's. You haven't packaged things up for somebody who is a decision maker to say, I have enough to make a decision, and now I'm going to make a decision. You may not like that decision, but at least they make a decision. At least things move forward. And you know that your work contributed either for or against that decision, as opposed to doing all the work, pouring the data all over the desk, and the person's like, cool.

And then they move on, and you feel like your work was completely pointless. So, what happened? So what? Now what? Embrace that.

Build from that, and that will help you make everything you do in marketing so much better. So that's my challenge to you, and your homework for the next week. Embrace the three what's and implement them on every report you touch this week. It may take longer, it shouldn't take longer to do your reports, but they'll be so much better. As always, please leave your comments below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.