How Data Shapes Perspective and PoV?

I personally always prefer using data to present and defend my viewpoints if possible, which I find very strong and effective. In business meetings, every one of the charts and graphs in the presentation represents the perspective and PoV that we want to deliver to the audience. Would love to share multiple real-life examples from my experience to bring you into the amazing data world.

Influencing Global Budget Allocation

In one of my global function experiences, we were overseeing the marketplace growth across the world, allocating resources and problem-solving the most critical problems of each market. Budget allocation is normally made based on historical performance and global strategic direction. Here I will share a great example of how data influences such important business decisions.

There was one fast-growing SEA market that got a relatively low budget proportion given that their revenue share was very low back then. At that time, we analyzed the payback period of all different markets to better understand the marketing effectiveness, the result was pretty decent for that market as it can break even much faster than others. We can imagine this as the business lends money to someone in exchange for immediate user growth, and takes back after a short period, and most importantly, the cohort revenue keeps going up over time.

This is a pretty great deal for a healthy business with a strong user base, as they don't need to be afraid of short-term "loss" and, with the marketing activities, it can not only drive user growth in a short period but also earn additional brand awareness contributing to longer-term business success.

Validating a Complicated Business Hypothesis

In one of my 1 to 10 experiences, we were working on growing a business that had PMF for a specific and small group of audience, looking to have a further push for exponential growth.

One of the key growth levers we decided to go with was strengthening our brand presence with a clearer value proposition and stronger authority because we were struggling to fight with traditional competitors in the bottom funnel, in which the audience didn't fully understand our unique value toward them and was scared as we were pretty new. However, it’s always not an easy story to pitch about investing in top-line awareness and mid-funnel consideration, as the effect is not direct and immediately reflected. Therefore, it's normally regarded as a waste of money if viewing it in the short run.

How we handled this was scaling the content production with 10X better quality with a well-designed product marketing message, and splitting ~10% more budget to the top and mid channels while maintaining the bottom funnel effort to keep the traction. And then closely monitoring core top-funnel metrics, including but not limited to Reach, Video view, Clicks, etc, to make sure the content is delivered to the target audience and triggers their interest effectively.

After several months, we managed to use data to make a strong validation of the success of the idea, allowing us to further invest in top and mid funnels to compound the effect. How we did this is to show a strong positive correlation between top and mid-funnel spending and organic growth, although it was not presented as a perfect causation due to the complexity of measurement, it's good enough when there were minimal external factors.

Better Controlling the Pace of the Business

We talked a lot about marketing-related topics, I think it would also be interesting to share a story of a 0 to 1 business, on how data helps to understand better of a business to better inform the key next steps.

From a high-level business perspective, we care about I) New and recurring users - cohort revenue $ and active user #, II) User # by subscription plan and product category, III) Fulfillment rate, etc. We observe things at a higher level to connect the dots between different parts of the business. For example, we’ve to keep a close eye on the fulfillment rate while unleashing new user growth, and it is best to get prepared earlier to oversupply and also gate-keep the supply quality-related metrics.

All these data are useful for management to make informed decisions and strategies, on what the focus should be NOW, and what has to be done EARLIER from what they foresee to happen in the FUTURE.

Final Notes

Be responsible for the data you are presenting, it’s okay to get back later instead of distorting the truth. Also, every person can have a different understanding of the same data set because of different positions, experiences, and beliefs. It’s always a good exercise to form a more holistic view integrating others’ thoughts. Hope you find this a great read, and see you again next week : )