Drawing On Digital Data (Market Research Series)

Our marketing efforts aren’t linear. We use different methods, get different results, and swap things out to fit our goals.

Digital, physical (aka traditional or non-digital marketing), it doesn’t really matter.

The real beauty is when one feeds the other.

Thanks to social media companies' monetization models—free content…with ads—digital marketing reveals blind insights that we can use.

(Ah, algorithms. What would we do without you?)

Similarly, thanks to YOUR monetization model, your physical marketing can create data to feed your digital marketing.

This should highlight how important accurate data entry and data cleaning is. When we need accurate, clean data we use AI to start and review for accuracy to save time.

The cleaner (and richer) the data the more useful it is for our purposes here.

Gathering Data: Digital

All digital marketing creates data.

(Haha, foolish mortals, accepting all cookies BWAHAHAHAHA!)

Likes, comments, shares, impressions, click-through, etc. the list literally goes on and on and it’d make your head spin.

The same insightful data (get it? Because they’re called insights?) or direct data shows the actual numbers and percentages that can inform broad-strokes decisions in marketing:

• Which platforms to use

• General demographics

• Interests

• Similar brands to emulate

The gathering of the data looks a little different from platform to platform, but we’re looking for insights on the top-level (not drilling down to individual posts and campaigns).

The best at this is Facebook – they call this data affinity scores.

Affinity scoring is comparing your brand to another interest or topic in terms of similarity of interests.

This alignment can give more insights – we decided to call it expanded data.

(Mostly because it was the first thing that came to mind in the meeting.)

On another note - if you’ve run ads you’ll have an extra layer of data called lookalikes.

Lookalikes are used on all platforms to target the next victim user to show your ads and we can use that information to figure out new avatars for customer groups.

(Note: your KW Command and Shopify ads do not supply this data.)

Gathering Data: Physical

Unlike digital marketing, physical marketing provides a better opportunity (in my opinion) to find related data.

Don’t get me wrong, direct data from physical marketing is useful—how many replies did you get from your mailer or networking event business cards?

Direct data helps us direct the ship.

On the flip side, because you’ve got the opportunity to interface more directly through physical marketing you can find out more information similar to affinity scores…just, y’know in person.

(It just takes a lot of notes and clean data entry.)

The interests we find out from this interfacing is where we build offer messaging and fine-tune strategy.

This Week’s Campaigns

Luxury Home Tour with a Twist

Offer a virtual tour of a luxury property, but focus on unexpected or quirky details that make it stand out…or can be used for, uh, less above-board activities.

Mindful Eating Tips

Offer guidance on practicing mindful eating habits to improve digestion, reduce emotional eating, and cultivate a healthier relationship with food.

Toodles,

Fahad and LJ

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