Marketing Data Visualization To Fully Leverage Your Sources of Truth
Can you easily see, understand and share how your marketing strategy is performing at any given point in time?
At Half Past Nine we love demonstrating the value of robust data, and there's truly no substitute for capturing complete and accurate data. All aspects of your marketing activity need to be consistently tracked.
However, you also need to interpret and communicate data in order to truly leverage its full power. This is what allows responsive and insightful decision making - and that's the whole point!
The first step is a streamlined data setup that’s ready and prepped to be imported into your reporting tools.
If you haven’t read our guides to capturing marketing data and ensuring ongoing data integrity, it's a good place to start.
- Marketing Data Analytics: How To Build Your Source Of Truth
- Marketing Data Analytics: Can You Trust Your Source Of Truth?
- 8 Marketing Data Issues That Might Be Holding You Back (And How To Fix Them)
- Switching To First-Party Data: It’s Time To Stop ‘Renting’ And Start Owning Customer Data
Otherwise, let’s get into how to use data visualization to turbocharge your marketing results and budget efficiency, with the goal of fueling business growth.
What Is Data Visualization, And How To Use It
Data visualization is the presentation of data in a visual format, turning raw data into insights that can be easily interpreted. If you’re doing it well, it makes it easy to see marketing performance at a snapshot in real-time (or near enough).
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You can use it to track how well marketing tactics are working by presenting data in a more visually aesthetic and digestible format, and present a story with a plot line based on actions taken and results that followed.
Data visualization and dashboards can also help create transparency and cohesion across departments, using bite-sized snippets of high-level information that can be easily communicated and understood.
Use marketing data visualization to:
- Tell a clear story about customer behavior and the results of your marketing efforts.
- Optimize live campaigns in real-time.
- See how marketing spending converts to revenue results.
- Quickly and easily understand how live campaigns are performing against your benchmarks as they progress.
- Exploit market opportunities.
- Identify trends and create benchmarks.
- Identify areas for improvement, optimization or divestment.
- Demonstrate what you’re doing to add value for the business and drive revenue.
There are a range of ways you can make your data more visual and easy to quickly understand. That includes:
- Dashboards, which are a collection of related charts
- Stand-alone charts
- Infographics
- Animations
- Diagrams
First, select the data that is most relevant for the question you want to answer. Then, choose the best-fit means of presentation to make the data’s meaning clear to see. Learn more about data categories and graph types.
Ideally, others within your business should be able to see what data is saying without much explanation required, if any.
Closed-loop Reporting
A quick point on closed-loop reporting. If you’re a B2B business, you’re less likely to be using ecommerce platforms or point-of-sale tools that automatically record sales conversions for you. In which case, you’ll use a method called closed-loop reporting. It brings together marketing analytics with sales reporting using a CRM system.
This style of relationship-based reporting provides visibility about where leads came from and what happened to those sales leads as they progressed through the sales pipeline. Each sales lead has to be manually recorded by an account manager, whether it’s when the lead fell out of the pipeline and why, or the value of a final sale. The data is used to calculate final ROI for the various lead generating channels.
CRM platforms like Salesforce support this type of reporting well, with built-in visualization tools for the sales pipeline data and resulting marketing ROI.
Four Tips For Impactful Data Visualization
Based on our experience and what we see our SME clients typically struggling with, here are our top four pointers.
1. Invest In Clean Data That Can Be Fed Into Visualization Tools
The better prepared your data and the more integrity it has, the more quickly and effectively you’ll be able to work with it.
If your data suffers from inconsistent formatting, missing fields, poor integrity or other similar problems, it may be harder or not possible to run it through a data viz tool. It’s easy to mistake visualization errors for a limitation of the program when it’s actually an issue with the imported data.
It’s worth going back to basics to get your data capture processes and data governance processes corrected before trying to proceed with visualization.
2. Use the Right Technology for Your Business
When businesses go down the old-fashioned route of traditional spreadsheets or manually created PowerPoint reports, the complexities of today’s marketing landscapes and the volume of data sets involved make it a cumbersome and time consuming task.
Teams struggle to report results close to real-time in order to make responsive decisions. Marketing is just like a performance car with many moving parts and it’s important to get immediate feedback on how your campaign acceleration (or braking) is affecting your 'speed'.
That’s why automating the reporting process is worth investing in, removing the delay with manual reporting. And there are many great tools out there to help you achieve that.
You’ll need to select compatible tools that are a good fit for your business depending on what data capture tools you already have in place, the level of cross-platform reporting and visualization complexity you require, the human resource you have available, and of course, your budget.
We’ll give you a break down of some of the best known and most popular data visualization software solutions shortly.
3. Invest In the Required Skill Sets To Match Your Technology
Your data capture and reporting tools are essentially redundant without the know-how to use them. It takes skill to see the wood from the trees in order to pull the right levers.
The more knowledge and ability available to pull and interpret data, the more value you’ll get in return. Many SME companies underinvest in the both the disciplined data capture processes required, and the analytical prowess to fully leverage the data tools they have.
If you can afford an in-house data engineer, or if you can outsource to a data analytics consultant, that’s ideal. However, you could also invest in training the best-placed member of staff you already have.
4. Keep Your Dashboards and Graphics Tightly Focused
Any digital marketing operation is going to have many data points that are continually being gathered. Try to present too much data and it can get overwhelming, detracting from the most important messages.
Be sure to create visualizations that are representative of what is most important for your marketing and business goals, or to whom you are communicating.
Visualizations should clearly answer specific and pertinent questions about marketing activity, customer behavior, and performance against KPIs. Stick to core ‘North Star’ KPIs that are actionable and lead the way objectively. They include the Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and spend metrics such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Check out some of the essential advertising KPIs you should be tracking.
You can build more than one dashboard, which should help you avoid the temptation of cramming too much into one report. Start with a top level KPI dashboard, and you can build additional dashboards to focus in on specific marketing activities or channels. Break up data reports into clear groupings such as:
- Channels
- Funnel placement
- Behavior / cohorts
- Audience segments
Data Visualization Tools
Let’s have a quick look at some of the best known and popular providers. However, definitely don’t stop here in terms of your research!
I'll break down the available data visualization tech stack into 3 sections:
- Data connectors - Creating your 'data pipeline', these tools allow transportation of data from one database into another, sometimes filtering and transforming data in the process so it’s ready to analyze.
- Data aggregators, or warehouses - These ‘big data’ tools store data from multiple sources, creating ‘data lakes’ where large volumes of structured and unstructured data can be stored.
- Data visualizers - These are the tools that provide you with the colorful visualization and dashboard presentation functionality, using data directly connected from its source, or from a data lake within an aggregator.
A few providers sit across more than one area, offering combined functionality, which is important to consider when choosing the right tool for your business.
Data Connectors
SuperMetrics picks up all the marketing data you need and brings it to your go-to reporting, analytics, or storage platform - whether that’s a BI tool, a spreadsheet, a data visualization tool, a data lake, or a data warehouse. With automation functionality, once you’ve built your report or dashboard, you can eliminate manual work by scheduling data transfers to automate your marketing reporting. Try a free trial.
Stitch rapidly moves data from 130+ sources into a data warehouse so you can get to answers faster, with no coding required. It can deliver your data to data lakes, warehouses, and storage platforms. Stitch will also replicate all available historical data from your database and SaaS tools for free. They boast that no code or engineering resources are required, and once set up, it syncs with new data automatically for automated reporting. You can get a free trial with unlimited data.
Funnel delivers data from over 500 marketing and advertising platforms, and additional sources upon request. It collects, cleans and maps all of your marketing data, which can save you hundreds of hours. Connect data to any destination, including BI tools, Data Warehouse, Google Data Studios or Sheets. A free trial is available, and their package offers unlimited data sources and automated job scheduling.
Databox is a dashboard visualization tool that also acts as a connector. Connect your data via any of their 70+ integrations, to data stored in Google Sheets or a SQL database, via API or Zapier. Their 70+ integrations come loaded with thousands of default metrics, as well as hundreds of pre-configured data blocks and 200+ pre-built reports that can be setup in minutes. Data can be refreshed hourly. Try a free account with 3 dashboards, users and data sources to experiment with.
Data Warehouses
BigQuery is a Google Cloud tool delivering a scalable and cost-effective data warehouse. Automatically move data from hundreds of popular business SaaS applications into BigQuery for free with their Data Transfer Service. Load and transform data at any scale from hybrid and multi-cloud applications. New customers get $300 in free credits to spend on Google Cloud during the first 90 days. All customers get 10 GB storage and up to 1 TB queries/month, completely free of charge. It also offers visualization reporting functionality using dashboards.
Snowflake sits at the cutting edge of data management, boasting the ability to eliminate data silos with the functionality to run your data workloads from a single platform. Their Data Cloud is a single location to unify your data warehouses, data lakes, and other siloed data, so your organization can comply with data privacy regulations such as CCPA and GDPR. It offers connectors for popular BI and Analytics tools. You’ll get automatic updates, and no scheduled downtime for data that’s always available. Try a free 30-day trial first.
Data Visualizers
Databox's intuitive visualization functionality is designed to let anyone build custom dashboards from multiple data sources.Their DIY Dashboard Designer pulls in metrics, facilitates visualization of KPIs in a variety of ways, with data drag-n-drop functionality, no code or design skills necessary, and personalized branding for your business. They also provide 200+ dashboard templates which can be customized however you want inside the Dashboard Designer. Their white label add-on also allows you to completely rebrand Databox as your own software.
Data Studio is a Google product, designed for use with its other products such as Google Analytics, Google Ads and YouTube. It pulls in compatible data quickly and easily, and has customize-able presentation that’s simple to use and can be tailored to your own branding. However, you’ll find that it’s not suited to pulling in data from non-Google or traditional database sources, and you can only view and share the data online with URL links. Plus, to automate data prep, you’ll probably need developer support. But, it’s free.
Power BI is a Microsoft product that can integrate across the entire Microsoft Power Platform, including Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure Data Lake Storage, as well as 100+ other apps. It can provide automated data refresh every half hour, mobile app access, published reports and embedded APIs. Create and share interactive data visualizations across global data centers, including national clouds to meet your compliance and regulation needs.
Tableau is another popular web-based product that allows you to pull in data from multiple sources with native connectors to most marketing data sources. Drag and drop functionality makes it easy to create colorful and appealing visualizations. Tableau offers touch functionality for mobile and tablet users, and huge datasets can be analyzed on a laptop, offline or in-memory. It’s also smart at detecting data errors, making it easier to prepare datasets, and you can automate regular report updates. With competitive pricing, it’s one of the market leaders. A free trial is available.
To Sum Up
Don’t just stop at capturing your data, or struggling with laborious and intermittent reporting after the fact. Assess how your financial and people resources can be used to introduce more automation to your marketing reporting.
With multiple data sources pulled into one tool that provides visual reports in snapshot dashboard format, you’ll experience the true value of your data. Enjoy easier decision making based on real and timely insights for more lucrative results.
At Half Past Nine, we’re on a mission to help SME businesses tap into the power of their un-mined data. We also want you to experience the joy of how effortless, instant and insightful your reporting can be. It really is game changing stuff!
If you think you might need some support managing and reporting your marketing data, please do just get in touch. We’re always delighted to have a conversation about how we can help.
Read next
*This article originally appeared in Forbes on February 26th, 2024. Link HERE
Innovation doesn't always scream; sometimes, it whispers. This is a lesson I've internalized as the founder of Dysrupt, where we've navigated the fine line between groundbreaking advancements and the comfort of familiarity. The 3% rule of change, championed by the late Virgil Abloh, a visionary in both fashion and design, offers a compelling lens to examine this balance. Abloh's ethos, focusing on the transformative power of subtle alterations, challenges the conventional push for radical innovation. It's a principle that resonates deeply in the tech world, particularly when comparing the strategic approaches of Apple's Vision Pro and Meta Quest Pro.
Abloh's influence extended beyond the realm of fashion; he was a cultural icon who redefined creativity, making his principles universally applicable, including in technology. His 3% rule—the idea that significant innovation can be achieved with minimal changes—underscores the importance of nuanced, thoughtful alterations.
The 3% Rule In Technological Innovation
Abloh's 3% rule is epitomized by the advent of Apple's "spatial computing." This term, much like "horseless carriage" in its day, melds the familiar with the novel, bridging the gap between traditional perceptions and forward-thinking technology. It suggests a nuanced evolution rather than a complete overhaul, offering a linguistic framework that makes new technologies more accessible and understandable.
Spatial computing, as introduced by Apple, allows for the integration of digital enhancements into our physical environment, enabling users to place virtual screens within their actual surroundings. This approach is contrasted sharply with Quest Pro’s goal of creating a fully immersive virtual environment, which, while technologically impressive, may alienate users who prefer a connection to their physical world.
This distinction is demonstrated in Casey Neistat's review of the Vision Pro in Times Square. Neistat's experience underscores the unique proposition of Vision Pro: the ability to seamlessly blend digital content with the real world, enhancing one's immediate environment rather than replacing it. By choosing what to see and where to see it, users retain control over their experience, embodying the essence of the 3% rule by making technology adapt to the individual's needs and preferences.
Expanding The NBA Viewing Experience
The divergent paths of Vision Pro and Quest Pro are nowhere more evident than in their partnership with the NBA to redefine the fan experience. While the Quest Pro aims to place fans directly courtside with its fully immersive VR experience, Vision Pro takes a different route. It introduces an enhanced viewing experience that transcends traditional limitations, offering "better than courtside" content. This approach leverages spatial computing to allow fans to enjoy multiple screens in their living space, offering various angles and aspects of the game in high definition, without losing touch with their immediate surroundings.
Meta Quest Pro's ambitious VR technology has the potential to transport fans into the heart of the action, offering an unparalleled sense of presence at live games. This full immersion into a virtual courtside experience represents a significant leap in how technology is used to bridge distances and bring the game to the viewer. However, this approach, while groundbreaking, may not align with all fans' desire for a more integrated viewing experience that maintains a connection to their physical environment.
Apple Vision Pro, in contrast, capitalizes on AR's potential to subtly enhance the real world. By allowing users to overlay multiple screens onto their physical space, Vision Pro offers a customizable viewing experience that can be tailored to each fan's preference. Whether it's accessing different camera angles, real-time statistics or social media feeds, Vision Pro provides a multidimensional viewing experience that enriches fans' engagement with live sports. This "better than courtside" experience doesn't remove fans from their reality; instead, it enhances it with layers of digital information and entertainment, embodying the essence of the 3% rule.
The Future Of Viewing
The introduction of Apple's Vision Pro into the marketplace heralds a nuanced shift in how viewers engage with broadcast entertainment. This principle, which advocates for impactful innovation through minimal adjustments, suggests a future where broadcasters will increasingly lean into subtle, AR-enabled enhancements to enrich the viewing experience. Instead of propelling audiences into fully immersive virtual realities, the trend is toward augmenting the physical environment with digital overlays that complement rather than replace the live viewing experience.
This evolutionary step, subtly integrated by technologies like Vision Pro, signals a move toward more personalized and contextually rich experiences within the familiar confines of viewers' existing environments. It represents a pivot in strategy for broadcasters, who now have the tools to create and distribute content that enhances reality, offering audiences the ability to customize their viewing experiences with information, graphics and interactive elements that were previously unimaginable.
This approach does not aim to upend the viewer's world with drastic changes; instead, it seeks to introduce enhancements that seamlessly integrate with their reality, offering a glimpse into how minimal shifts can have a profound impact on the collective viewing experience. In this emerging landscape, the 3% rule becomes a guiding principle for broadcasters and technologists alike, emphasizing that sometimes the most meaningful innovations are those that refine and redefine our experiences without displacing them.
Subtle Shifts, Major Impact: A More Effective Approach To Innovation
Dysrupt is a 💎✋ marketing firm and not above the occasional meme trend. With all the news of r/wallstreetbets, RobinHood, $GME, etc. we want to take a step back and deep dive on this often used internet term with an interesting history - *meme.
Origin
Meme as a term predates internet culture. Originally coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene.
Dawkins conceived of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes and considered them, in a manner similar to “selfish” genes, as being in control of their own reproduction and thus serving their own ends. Understood in those terms, memes carry information, are replicated, and are transmitted from one person to another, and they have the ability to evolve, mutating at random and undergoing natural selection, with or without impacts on human fitness (reproduction and survival). - link
Dawkins himself defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation."
The Selfish Gene was groundbreaking due to meme kicking off a deeper investigation in **academia around the extent of evolutionary processes that are unrelated to genes.
Memes though are units of cultural significance. If they are repeated then they carry more significance than those that fail to replicate.
Here is a silly example: the cleaning crew in a hotel folding the toilet paper into a triangular shape is a meme. This happens worldwide now - even in some gas station bathrooms - and is an artifact of culture. It is a transfer of information in the network of humanity. This is a recent invention of culture which now carries a significance. Namely that the room was cleaned by a professional who spared no expense as they even decided to fold the toilet paper end into a small triangle.
In this light, the modern use of meme just being easily shareable phrases, images, gifs, etc. is a limited use of the term. It can extend to anything that is imitated within culture. Everything from the mundane - Fork, Knife, Spoon placement on a table - to the absurd - Qanon.
r/WallStreetBets and Community
We are a marketing firm and the recent explosion of meme stocks has been a fascinating watch in the power of community and how it empowers a movement. If you are in the business of brand building, you are trying to gain attention and direct it to action.
r/WallStreetBets created a movement of directing a group of disjointed individuals via the glue of memes. These memes allow the group to have a shared language and jokes that bond via an in group mentality. Their “units of imitation” are simple to replicate and share.
The brazen ridiculousness of all the terms makes them even more mockable which requires sharing and imitation and bonding of the in-group.
I’m an Advertiser and Don’t Care about Stonks
Budweiser made a meme with its “Wassupp” ad. TikTok’s Duet feature and many other product features on platforms are meme engines. (Memegins?) Share buttons are littered throughout the internet. Every piece of content screams to be replicated.
Yes r/WallstreetBets has a lot of weird language but after about 15 minutes you’ll start typing 🚀 🌕 with little thought and will start judging the 📜 ✋ in the midst who cost you tendies.
Easy to imitate and through the imitation the group improves upon the original idea. The successes are repeated and become even more shareable and immitatable. This is the evolutionary process Dawkins keyed into. Failure is easy to define as it is just content that is not replicated and shared.
The flywheel is that the sharing and imitation increases further sharing. Understanding how to bring this to your brand, your community, can be key to kickstarting your own movement.
What’s the Difference Between a Bad, Good and Great Story?
Bad stories are forgotten. Good stories are remembered. Great stories are retold.
The retelling and sharing within culture is the power of brand advertising.
In fact, this might be the easiest way to differentiate between brand and direct response ads. Direct response ads are judged on product sales and perhaps help define a brand.
Brand ads should be judged on the great story criteria - are they retold? Shared? Imitated? Sales will come from causing this replication.
* How to pronounce: meme rhymes with gene.
** Aaron Lynch in his book Thought Contagion defined 7 patterns of transmission for memes: Quantity of parenthood, Efficiency of parenthood, Proselytic, Preservational, Adversative, Cognitive, Motivational.
