(Repost from 2014)
This is one of my big points in content strategy. Sometimes people think it’s a conflict with creativity.
Great data is as human as you are. It’s an intimate knowledge of your audience that allows you to tell a better story. Tell me you’re not funnier when you tell a joke to a friend – because you know what that person likes and dislikes.
Photo by Quinn Dombrowski.
“You want to cultivate internal capability, not just hire it” – Michael Schrage in HBR on data fluency in a team.
You don’t want the “analytics person” to be the only one on the team who speaks the language.
Your data is (are, depending on your grammatical preference) your personal information – the biggest currency there is today; control it, own it, and even find a way to profit by it. Everybody else does.
I’ve been asked to explain programmatic buying.
So….remember when you, or someone on your team, would review (hopefully on a daily basis at least) your digital ad performance, and re-allocate the buys immediately to optimize your spend? Requiring six calls to one or more agencies and probably a few arguments along the way.
Most tasks like this are better when machines do ’em.
Programmatic buying is part of marketing automation. Set your parameters and you can optimize in real time.
You’ll still be reviewing constantly, but you’ll be far more efficient, and you’ll learn a lot from the patterns that emerge.