What Does a Data Driven Culture Look Like?

What Does a Data Driven Culture Look Like?

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I'd like to start by saying that this list is by no means exhaustive. Every company and industry faces their own challenges and even the below topics could have multiple sub-topics for further clarification. Those are topics for another day. That said, my experience in both large and small organizations have molded my perspective that being data driven is the byproduct of organizational maturity, culture, leadership, technology, and the quality of its analysts.

They all influence what data looks like when it's collected, analyzed, and interpreted. All are equally important and if one is less mature than its counterpart, your organization stops evolving as a data driven organization.

Data driven organization









This might be obvious but bear with me. Leadership has to talk the talk. They set the tone for corporate culture and what it can achieve so the more analytical they are the more traction your organization will have. Your organization needs a leader who is passionate about technology and understands the nuances between the different products in the market. A leader who understands the landscape of digital media, social, and tag management (yes, TMS), but an expert in analytics.

Why analytics? Because analytics, in many organizations, is becoming the hub for digital marketers. Media can be optimized but loses influence once the prospect reaches your digital storefront. The goal for most digital marketers is to drive traffic to their website where behavioral analysis can be understood, and CRO is pursued to optimize the user experience.

It Starts With Leadership









Qualitative data as well as quantitative data can be captured, analyzed and understood. Many companies are now sending their web and channel data into offline data storage systems to better understand their visitors and all of their digital touch points so that they can inform tomorrows marketing decisions. Visitor level analytics is the future of web marketing.

An expert in web analytics will best understand the web and channel data, make sure it is clean and consumable, then optimize the digital experience based on analyses. If leadership recognizes and invests into an analytics driven culture then data driven you will be.

It Starts With Leadership









The bigger the company the harder it is to be data driven, even if leadership believes in the power of analytics. Large organizations have teams that work in silos and operate extremely inefficiently; experiences get created with no clear business objectives, the analytics team doesn't provide requirements or perform QA before launch, therefore project budgets go unchecked and experiences lack optimization.

I can't tell you how many multi-million dollar digital products have been launched under my nose where analytics was either an afterthought or never a thought at all.

Culture









Sadly, I'm sure most of you who are reading this have experience the same. Regardless of your solution/tool, analytics must be the center of your marketing universe. If it's not, start hosting brown bag meetings and open office hours. Educate your organization and the rest of marketing on the benefits of data. I always say, "you don't know what you don't know" so I can’t blame other teams within the organization for not having analytics at top of mind.

It's likely that those in design, UX, brand, operations, etc. are unaware of the potential in your analytics tool so educate and don’t let them forget. After a while, someone in analytics will notice that they are getting included in project meetings earlier and earlier until finally, at the kickoff meeting.

Culture









Culture also impacts data quality. If analytics is an afterthought then you can count on having bad data. Bad data is worse than having no data. In fact, I would argue that bad data is more dangerous than no data. You can't make informed while bad decisions from zero data but you can if it's wrong. Again, analytics should be the center of your marketing universe. Data is getting bigger, more complicated, and likely being used in multiple downstream data sources, so invest into a data governance process.

Bad data isn't an excuse for not making decisions, it just degrades trust and justifies decisions based on intuition, not data. Without accurate, accessible, and reliable data, it's hard to understand your prospects as they interact with all of your digital products and channels. This might be the most unattractive part of marketing analytics, but it’s arguably the most important yet disregarded piece to understanding and optimizing your marketing efforts. Invest heavily into data quality and collection.

Data Quality









Another sure sign of a data driven culture is having the desire to improve outcomes (assuming you have a data driven culture and your data is worth analyzing). Having a testing culture built into your organization demonstrates a level of maturity in data analytics and curiosity towards the "why" and "so what".

Questions always lead to more questions and an ongoing list of questions will help your organization mature past the spray-and-pray approach and toward a deeper understanding of your prospects. If your organization lacks a testing culture today, develop one as soon as possible. Spend the time developing a process, frequently send out communication and educate your organization. You can't argue with data so create educated, data driven hypothesis then test them. Expose your organizations inefficiencies and it won't take long before a data driven culture is born.

CRO, Testing & Optimization









I think that one of the most crippling things that almost every organization has is lots of reports with lots of meaningless data-points. Leadership becomes so afraid of overlooking a slice of data that a single metric gets repeated over-and-over and vanity metrics are plastered all throughout a 20+ page report. Mark Twain once said, "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one."

Take the time to think through your reports, what truly matters, and get rid of the garbage that creates white noise. 20 pages lead to crickets in the conference room because of overwhelming amounts of data and at the end of the hour, there are no clear takeaways for tomorrows marketing efforts. Organizations get use to cranking out the same reports every week, only adding to it. Likely this will create a need for another report. And another. Sound familiar?

Short, Concise Reports









Don't allow your organization to become comfortable with or rely on a particular report. To be data driven you must find enough value in the data to ask more questions and make marketing decisions. But, those questions and efforts should give birth to new data relationships where some of the report stays (because it's still providing value) and other parts will change. If you are ever experiencing data paralysis or NOT making data driven decisions, then your reports might not be providing the value they once were.

What are your thoughts? What does a digital, data driven culture look like to you?

Short, Concise Reports







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What Does a Data Driven Culture Look Like?