If there’s one thing that’s consistent about marketing, it’s inconsistency. The content that works well this week might bomb next week. The advertising style that makes one brand could mean the death of another. Choosing where to invest your time and money can feel a bit like playing pin the tail on the donkey.

One of the fab things about digital marketing is that you are able to quickly and cheaply collect huge amounts of data and use this to test and learn before making big investments.  Yet organisations are still failing to use “Big Data” to their advantage.

Not testing, not learning

For me, marketing is a bit like decorating your house. There are two approaches I often encounter and both are as cringeworthy as rag-rolled walls. Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario 1

You buy the same shade of ivory/oatmeal/dust that you’ve always bought and slap it on every wall. It looks fine, but everyone thinks you’re a bit boring and you don’t make any new friends. Also, some of your old friends have started hanging out at Ted’s. Ted has a bar in his garden shed and makes his own beer.

Scenario 2

You’re intrigued by the newly installed colour-matching machine at your local DIY centre and decide to create your own unique shade of mauve. Unfortunately, the colour calibration must have been a bit off and your front room now looks like an episode of Changing Rooms circa 1997. Your friends laugh at you and head over to Ted’s.

Of course, there is a third option. You could buy a few teeny tiny pots of your preferred colours and try them out. Once you know which looks best, you can revamp the whole room (and watch Ted’s home-brew-addled shed chums come crawling back).

Make Big Data small

Like substandard home improvers, business leaders are failing to recognise the value in encouraging a test and learn culture. As ridiculous as these scenarios may seem, it’s exactly what organisations are doing: either sticking to the same old way of doing things and losing out to competitors, or jumping on board every new trend and wondering why it isn’t working for them.

Perhaps it’s the name itself, Big Data, that puts people off using it. Certainly, the sheer amount of numbers on offer can be overwhelming and there is often a tendency to seek “vanity metrics” to claim progress that isn’t really there. So how can you start to change things?

1. Take a step back. Ignore the data for a moment and ask yourself what your ultimate goal is. Increase sales? Generate leads? Improve customer retention? Now open your eyes and pick one figure that could influence your goal. It might be contact form submissions, average spend per customer, or the number of people unsubscribing from your marketing emails.
2. Next, split your audience. An 80:20 split is always useful and an efficient use of time and money. Continue presenting 80% of your audience with the same old content, and introduce the remaining 20% to your test content.
3. Only choose one variable – such as email subject line, landing page layout, a different image. Choosing more than one will make it difficult to say exactly which element has influenced customer behaviour.
4. Do the math. Which target group saw a higher percentage open your email? Which group was least likely to sign up for your newsletter? Did changing your form layout reduce the abandoned cart rate?
5. Put it into action. Don’t just sit on the results – change what you are doing and then move on to the next test.

Testing is responding

By keeping things simple, you not only make implementation easier, you are more likely to achieve statistically viable insights about customer behaviour that you can use to justify further investment. What’s more, simplicity allows continuous, incremental change, meaning that you are always working to align yourself with the needs and wants of those who keep you in business.

Ultimately, using data effectively is about getting to know and understand your customers – sometimes better than they do themselves. It’s a cost-effective way of acting responsively, while quickly achieving the results you want: less blindfolded child with a pin and more chess Grandmaster.