- December 29 2015
- Galen Dow
Data! Data! Data!
You assemble a world class Pipeline Marketing stack. A great Marketing Automation Platform, a CRM and you layer a snazzy Analytics Layer across the top. You methodically tie in your Content Amplification strategies so that you are building insights about the relationships between your gozintas and your comezoutas. And now you are ready to be a lot smarter about your marketing investments!
Then you have meetings where you look at the data and try and make good decisions.
“We did this, and that happened”.
Notice the critical use of ‘and’…not ‘because’…’that happened because we did this’.
Timeout. Let’s accept how marketing has changed so quickly in the last little bit, and how as marketers, our language has failed to keep pace.
With that in mind, on offer are some terms that every marketer should become more familiar with:
Correlation and Causation
Correlation does not automatically imply Causation. This is a big one people often miss. If you are going to make decisions based upon data, you need to understand all of the variables at play. In the case of the meeting mentioned above, it turned out that an increase in web traffic could be seen in historical data and the recent spike was probably more likely due to seasonal factors then any actions the marketing team had taken. The new team member hadn’t had the benefit of history so was on the way to recommending more investments in a test that hadn’t necessarily panned out.
Confirmation Bias
We are all guilty of this. We approach the world through a lens that helps us to put meaning to all of the random things that are happening around us. Because these worldviews are often hard won, we are loathe to change them. This means that we will view events, and data, in ways that confirms rather than challenges our world view.
Baseline Data (or Control Data)
This one is not so much hard to understand as it is underutilized. I’ve seen plenty of cases where the baseline data was carefully selected to move the conclusion in a specific direction. Don’t hesitate to challenge the baseline data you are given, and more importantly, make sure that when you embark on a marketing test that you have solid baseline data to compare against.
First Party and Third Party Data
If you aren’t familiar with these terms as a marketer, than you need to catch up to current capabilities quickly. Your marketing stack is accumulating rich data sets and if you are really good, your sales team is consistent in entering in the information that you need, in the way that you need it into your CRM. All of this data, that you own, is First Party Data.
Perhaps the most exciting development happening in B2B marketing today is in the ability to leverage Third Party Data, sometimes independently of your (first party) data and sometimes leveraging both in complementary ways.
Third party data can include data that you may have purchased in the past such as mail lists.
More interestingly however today, is that you can now correlate a wide range of data sets, such as Income, Title, Firmographics and different patterns of online behavior to specific sets of cookies. In other words, a device shows up as a visitor to your site, and you can access a large number of 3rd Party data Sets in real time to learn an enormous amount about that visitor. You can then retarget specific Personas based upon this data and when you see a relationship between data sets and conversion rates, you can ‘lookalike’ target these Personas across the web using a Programmatic buying tool.
Persona Based Retargeting can lift conversion rates by 300% over traditional Behavior Based Retargeting methods.
Watch for lots of business models to evolve that leverage digital experiences with third party data. Credit Karma is one that is worth understanding.
Do you have other terms that you think we all should be using more often or more clearly? Let us know!
Hey you!
Would you like a walk through of what we believe is the ultimate B2B Programmatic Buying Platform? It’s really cool and interesting, but most importantly we can show you how 3rd party data is easily applicable to your online marketing and can generate real ROI.
Accelerate your funnel and use a massively scalable marketing strategy that will drive awareness and leads as big as you want. Want to learn more? Reach out to us!