Your Marketing Data Can Serve Purposes Other Than Insights: It's much more valuable.

When is it OK to have insights? Sometimes. When is the best moment to collect data? Always.

It's easy to think of insights as to the ultimate upgrade from data in today's world—a destination that, once achieved, frees a marketer from the burden of meaningless statistics, graphs, columns, and rows.

That opportunity exists in some cases, but the data-driven marketer understands that insight is only one approach to extracting value from data. There's a lot more worth to be had.

Data, like technology, is frightening. It necessitates hard talents, catalyzes beliefs and acts, and maybe hazardous in the wrong hands. There's always something new or unknown. Even highly competent data-driven marketers can't answer some questions, numbers that don't match, or expectations that can't be satisfied. As a result, it's understandable why so many marketers see insights into the holy grail.

Marketers who want to exploit data as a competitive advantage must be comfortable (or find someone who is) with all of its vast, frightening, and messy complexity.

Because of the fear factor, many marketers believe one of two things:

1. Data is just poorly marketed insights, or
2. If we can obtain insights, data is no longer relevant.

However, just as a necklace is only one of many valuable items made from gold, insights are only one type of data output.

Data is a comprehensive tool that serves as an input for predictive models, learning algorithms, appealing visualizations, and a vehicle for personalized experiences and a quantifiable asset.

As a result, confusing insights with data or devaluing data in the face of insights limits the value data may provide to marketing teams.

Marketers should focus on adopting the two tactics below to optimize this value.

Create a data strategy for the company.

Recognize the commercial value of data and evaluate how you may better utilize it. In what ways may data make marketing more effective or efficient? Is there a potential external market for it that could generate revenue?

To improve the value and meet business and marketing goals, focus on harnessing and leveraging data for as many outcomes as possible.

Fitbit's entire product suite, for example, is built on data. The company's technological advancements and services result from analyzing the data users have logged to figure out the best next steps for them.

Overall, including data into your business strategy—complete with a budget and an owner—can assist you in obtaining and maintaining data that the organization deems instrumental.

Include data planning in your marketing strategy.

Great insights are critical to the planning process to inform strategy and inspire creativity. However, there is still much material that we can use once we have written the brief.

Consider a cellphone's weather app, which uses GPS data to automatically offer weather reports suited to a user's present location. This essential interaction requires little knowledge or data manipulation yet provides much value from a single data point.

Burton used a weather API to bring up apparel recommendations based on visitors' local weather—anywhere in the world—pushing GPS and weather technologies even farther.

Beyond the Mindset of Insight

Marketers may outperform competitors caught in insight-driven mindsets by implementing the two techniques suggested here and concentrating on the full potential of data. As a result, they'll be able to add more value to their businesses and customers.

You shouldn't need an algorithm to figure out that's a good idea.