Analyzing Data to Find Insights

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Unearthing insights

Insights are about answering the why and not the what.

By now you will have a lot of ‘what’ gathered. The ‘why’ is found through human analysis. You will need to pull all of the components of your research together to find the common threads, overlaps, and trends, and there is no easy answer to this.

If anyone has seen the TV series “Homeland” and remembers that complex wall of images and strings and articles that Carrie Mathison puts up to try to find her insights, your process will look a lot the same. However, you probably won’t put things up on a wall! You’ll spend a lot of time sifting through data to find those patterns.

SWOT analysis

You can use various processes to uncover insights. One common process is a SWOT analysis.

SWOT, for those who are unfamiliar with the acronym, stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Though many SWOT analyses are created by looking at your competition, this one is more centered on your audience.

Here’s what to look for in a SWOT analysis:

Strengths: When you’re thinking about your strengths, for instance, think about them in relation to your audience perspective. On strengths, where do your assets and values overlap with your audience? Where can you find strong, common ground? What is it that will make you a clear choice?

Weaknesses: Are there any audience perceptions that could hurt you in their eyes? Where are your values, offerings, products, and services incongruent with your audience needs and wants?

Opportunities: If this is an audience that is untapped, there could be an opportunity that you didn’t recognize at first. Or, if you’re established, maybe there’s a new angle to reignite an old conversation.

Threats: What are the cultural threats, emerging attitudes, industry threats, emerging technologies? As you watch and learn from your audience, you can fill these in.

Onlyness

According to thought leader and Harvard Business writer Nilofer Merchant, the way we create value has changed. It’s not enough to offer a unique angle or just to be differentiated. In the social era where everyone can be a publisher and choice is endless, onlyness is that thing that will make us stand out.

Your onlyness refers to that unique point of view and experience that only you can bring to the table. It’s your experience, your knowledge, your history, your vision, your passion, and everything else that makes you uniquely you.

When it comes to connecting the dots, you have to think back to the beginning when we discussed assets and resources. As a digital marketer, you know your product, service, company, history, and so on inside out. At the end of the day, what you offer your audience can only come from you.

Example: Moleskin

You may be familiar with a company called Moleskin. They make notebooks, but not just any notebook – but a special notebook that has become beloved to their audience. And how is it that a company that makes notebooks launching in 1997 during the upswing of the digital revolution grew to sell 10 million books per year?

They found their onlyness in a piece of their history that appeals strongly to their target audience. In the literature that accompanies every notebook is a story that goes, “It all started many years ago with a pocket-sized black object. The product of a great tradition, the Moleskin notebook is, in fact, the heir and successor to the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries. Among them, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin.”

Though the Moleskin of today may be very different from the notebook by these artists in history, this history is unique to Moleskin and their audience, creative professionals who are obsessed with design and nostalgia. They found the perfect message to reach this audience by finding their sweet spot.

Finding the sweet spot

Once you find your onlyness or your unique point of view or offering, draw a circle and name it. For example, say, I’m luxury paint and wallpaper company, Farrow and Ball. So my passion is for creating high quality, meticulously designed wallpaper, and high quality eco-friendly paint. I never take any shortcuts and I have a long history of quality.

So then now that you know your audience, or potential audience, draw a second circle that overlaps yours realistically. This is where your onlyness and point of view meets your audience’s interest and needs. For example, interior designers who work on historical restorations, high-end hospitality, and iconic interiors. The overlap is in the obsession over quality and the detail of the color. The third section that you draw is where you remove part of that overlap. So, for instance, luxury interior design magazines that also appear to high quality and high-end products.

What is left over? That’s your sweet spot, the place where your goals and your onlyness and your passion overlaps with your audience needs and wants and passions, but then removes the major competition. So, in this case, an obsession over color.

Turning analysis into insights

Remember that facts are the what and insights are the why. How can you move from the what to the why?

Here’s how you can turn analysis into insights:

• Take all the data together to see if there are patterns emerging in specific areas. Don’t look at individual numbers such as followers or number of posts per week.
• Then, look for strong relationships between the data points, such as connections between tribes, connections between competitors and tribes, and connections between the data points themselves.
• Look for surprising anomalies in the data, things that you didn’t expect to happen or seem a little out of place.
• Sometimes there is a story between the lines. Even the best research doesn’t always tell the whole story, such as the earlier example about the red pen. It took an understanding of teachers to start to see that red pen emerge and re-emerge and to tie it back to their experience.
• Finally, you should ask the ‘five whys of data’. The five whys refer to the number of questions that you have to ask of your initial insights to get to the nugget of the insight that will drive your strategy. The first statement that you make will probably not be in-depth enough to lead to an actionable insight, so you have to ask why several times. Five times is the recommended, hence the five whys.

Example: Dove

Based on a very powerful insight, in 2004 Dove turned the beauty marketing world on its head, and still 12 years later it’s still setting the standards. Consider how the five whys could play themselves out with Dove.

So, first, the problem. You’re losing market share in face wash. This is the data point.

1. First why: The first question would be, “Oh, why?” Because women are buying higher end products.
2. Second why: “Why is that?” Because women have been convinced that spending more money on skin care is better.
3. Third why: “Well, why is that?” Because this marketing is preying on their insecurities.
4. Fourth why: “And why is that?” Because women have more insecurities about their looks.
5. Fifth why: “And, well, why is that?” Because from a young age, women are told that we have to look a certain way to be valued. Bingo!

Unravel the cause to lessen the effect. And voila, here’s the statement: “We see beauty around us. At Dove, we want to help free ourselves and the next generation from beauty stereotypes.” It’s this message that’s at the heart of our campaign for real beauty and self-esteem fund.