Research & Discovery | Analytics Angels

Research & Discovery

For starters, we work with you on forming a clear business and/or marketing objective, then we see what owned data you have as well as your existing marketing technology stack. Forming a business objective is key when wanting to understand how you can use your data to better your bottom line. Every campaign you run should have a purpose in what it is meant to achieve. Is it brand awareness, thought leadership, lead generation, sales? These become the starting point for determining your business goal, and how you can possibly think about how this goal can be measured in quantifiable terms.

Our next step in the research and discovery process would be to benchmark your owned data. What we mean by “owned data” is any data you collect from your owned media and platforms, i.e. your website, your company social media profile, or your CRM. What marketing technology, if any, do you employ, i.e. Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce? If you are not fully engaged in many of these platforms, that’s okay too, we can work with any of the data you do own. Getting the right data is not easy – it takes a lot of work – and it is hard to determine what good benchmarks are even out there so the best thing to do is benchmark against yourself, so you need to get a good baseline of data so you can see improvement over time. We help you get that all sorted.

Benchmarking against industry data is also an option, but industry data is just that – it might not always be completely aligned with your business niche or specific goals. It is derived from a pool of data from a bunch of other companies. Generally we use these only as a ticker to see how you’re doing compared to your competition (which is still a fair indicator) and regard benchmarking against your own data as the best practice.