Good strategy uses as many inputs as possible from a wider group of sources, such as focus groups, industry research, customer feedback, internal stakeholders, and many more.
Great strategy uses qualitative research and overlays multiple data sources to get a complete picture of audience behaviours and attitudes to provide richer strategic insight.
So how can data help, and what data points are most effective? In this post, I examine several datasets and outline how they can be used to improve overall strategy and where they add value to qualitative research.
Web Analytics
Google Analytics can be a gold mine for helping strategists understand how users interact with a brand online. In addition to understanding how users find a website, GA can provide insights into the paths users take through the site, the type of content they engage with, and, ultimately, the moments of truth when a user becomes a customer or leaves the sales cycle.
Combining this empirical data with opinions or insights from focus groups helps brands refine the content and messaging that drives positive outcomes and address structural issues that cause customer friction.
Analyzing data from a more prolonged timeframe informs broader customer behaviour and can inform media strategy. Looking at all the touchpoints and channel sources that lead to a purchase or lead can help media planners understand what media and messaging work to drive initial interest. Equally, taping into lifetime customer data informs what combination of channels is most likely to yield a successful outcome, as well as how many visits and types of content brands should expect to have before a customer is in a position to buy.
Search Data
Despite the rise of social media (more on this later) as part of the buying journey, around 80% of consumers use search to research product categories.
Google Search Console provides brands with an extraordinary amount of data about how their brand performs on organic search, including a detailed breakdown of how their website ranks for the phrases used to find them, which pages attract users, and how this data has changed over time.
Strategists for global brands can use the data to understand subtle differences between countries, helping to identify trends that might help expand into new markets and territories and can be augmented with business goals and priorities to develop a strategy to be successful in new countries.
While Search Console provides data and insights into what is happening on a brand's website, Google Trends can help strategists identify search terms or themes that can help define Total Addressable Markets (TAM) and more tactical opportunities for growth.
Finally, Google Ads provides granularity regarding predicted search volume and keyword cost per click. This data can influence media strategy by providing insights into the expected budget to gain the traffic volumes needed for a positive ROI.
Social Media
While search data and web analytics provide huge amounts of data to gain insights into an audience is actions, they are also anonymous and provide little insight into the ethnographic makeup of a brand's customers or users.
Analysis of a brand's followers on social media provides a profound way to explore not only the demographic makeup of an audience but can be used to understand the audience's attitudes, opinions and sentiments towards particular topics.
This data can also be used to ensure that opinions from a focus group are weighted or scaled in accordance with a larger pool of data.
Like Google Ads data, social media ad platforms provide data or validation to support audience or persona research. By using targeting parameters that align with an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), strategists can measure the size of a target audience, segmented by geography, industry and more.
3rd Party Data
While the first-party data sources outlined above can provide game-changing insights, seemingly random data often provides a strategy's most significant “a-ha” moments.
Consider the impact that weather might have on customer behaviour. Aside from seasonal purchases, the local weather could impact an audience's willingness to leave their home to visit a retailer.
Some years ago, while engaged by a kitchen retailer, we correlated website data with historical weather patterns and found that visits to the showroom and sales increased on weekends when the weather was poor. Using this, we increased bids on paid search ads when rain was forecast to drive traffic to the ‘find showroom’ page and attract more customers to the showroom.
In summary, crafting strategy is a complex, time-consuming task; however, by including as many data-driven insights as possible, strategists can deliver deeper and richer strategic thinking.