If every business — of any size and in any industry — shares one pie-in-the-sky goal, it’s to connect with target consumers when they’re making purchase decisions and provide exactly the right information to influence brand choice. In fact, one of the greatest gifts of the modern phenomenon of big data is the actionable insight it can provide about the impact of everyday interactions that people are having with your brand, including news coverage, email, print ads and product experiences.
Find out how and why to bridge the gap between what you do and what customers want in a free ebook by Teradata, Be A Big Data Marketing Hero.
As this ebook points out, the problem is that there’s just so much data, in so many formats, coming in so quickly. Filtering the difference-making data from the nice-to-know details and then harnessing and applying the right information is a near-crippling challenge facing businesses, big and small, throughout the globe.
Yet, even those savvy companies that manage to develop sustainable reporting methods are often hard pressed to figure out how to communicate information throughout the organization so that insights are implemented in the real world of customer interactions. And ultimately, if your internal processes and strategic programs aren’t helping you get closer to customers and improve sales, you’re probably wasting opportunity and resources.
Here are three tips for communicating consumer data to your internal teams.
What’s the story?
Most data analysts have a natural love for creating dashboards, charts and graphs. But analysts and communication teams tend to speak different languages, making it tough to convey the story of how data can improve marketing, manufacturing and business operations.
“People are inundated with data,” explains Melinda Spaulding, president of Practical Insights, a pharmaceutical market research firm. “But if you can’t tell marketing executives what the data means or how it can help them reach and motivate customers, then it’s useless.”
To improve the value of consumer data, Spaulding is joining many successful business leaders in a determined search for better ways to tell stories that resonate with implementers. Instead of statistical gurus and math whizzes, companies who are desperate to reign in the potential of big data are turning to creative experts who can craft compelling stories by leveraging audio, visual and audience engagement technologies.
Show and Tell
The entire point of big data analytics in business is to help CMOs, COOs, CFOs and employees throughout a company make data-driven decisions that improve efficiencies. That’s why people who can articulate the implications of data and drive business strategy are genuine big data heroes.
“People are multitasking creatures,” she says. “When I started using multidimensional presentation tools, I witnessed a profound change in how audiences respond to data. By allowing people to synthesize information in different formats and make connections on their own, the combination of audio and visual stimuli made it easier for market-facing teams to see what’s going on — how various data points relate to each other and how the information applies to the real-world work they’re doing on a daily basis.”
Visualization is simply powerful in ways that static text can’t be. Possibly one of the best examples is the population map of Detroit that shows the racial divide along 8 Mile Road. No matter how many interesting ways someone might describe this segregation in words or video, nothing can pack the punch of this map.
So, as you develop processes and strategies to apply consumer data to businesses improvement efforts, pay close attention to how you deliver insights to decision-makers and client-facing teams. If it’s not easy to understand and implement, all your careful analysis and reporting may end up collecting dust on the shelf instead of boosting customer interaction and profits.
