Once upon a time, data was a rare and valuable commodity. We were careful warehousers of the scant statistics we had. Dependable data had always been hard to come by so many of us thought it was a Holy Grail that would sell products.
The move to a full-digital society meant our ability to retain large amounts of input skyrocketed. It bred the era of big data when we suddenly had more info than we could handle. Remember when a petabyte was inconceivably huge? Of course you do. In the technology sector, the focus began to shift from the capacity to store information to the ability to sort and retrieve it effectively when needed.
Big Data vs. Context
In marketing technology, we came upon a slightly different problem. In the data-saturated world of technology, people began to forget that performance stats are only a means to an end. Once every company had a website, the public (theoretically, at least) had access to all the necessary data about your product or service you needed to give them.
In the days of data starvation, the focus of marketing was to put the numbers in front of consumers who would not get to see them otherwise. It was how you distinguished your product.
Now, search engines allow people to easily do their own research. As long as you’ve published your spec sheets with just a smidgen of thought to what potential clients will search for, you can be fairly confident that prospects can to find it.
Our job, when you ask us for a marketing campaign is the context behind their stats. Why do the performance choices you’ve made matter to their organization? If you take away the statistics, what can you tell people your product does for a company? Raw computing power has been backing out of the spotlight to make way for how an offering fits into your ecosystem.
Once we have the story of how something will change their business for the better, we can trickle in a limited amount of key statistics to prove the point.
Feed the funnel
The end goal is always sales, of course, but most of us got a little misdirected along the way and put too much emphasis on marketing to the middle of the funnel. The priming of interested prospects where statistics are most useful. It’s understandable. It’s closer to the sale, right?
Of course, the middle of that funnel needs to be fed by a much larger number of prospects who are brought in by just a passing notice. And that’s where context is king. Always, the what comes before the how.
A Place for Numbers
It’s not that we don’t want your reams of data. In the same way that technology has spent the last ten years pivoting from data collection to data usability, we need to plumb the depths of your data for the pieces that will give businesses a practical purpose for your solution. It still has tremendous value but only with when we can frame it in a very human way.
Let us help you put a human face on technology again.