#154: Facts over Feelings: The Power of Data-Driven Decision Making in Business
Data-driven decision making is one of the most powerful tools available to businesses. It helps them make better, more informed decisions that are based on facts rather than feelings. Data gives businesses an objective way to identify problems and opportunities, measure performance, and develop strategies for future success. Here are some of the benefits of using data-driven decision making in business:
1. Improved Accuracy
Data-driven decision making ensures that decisions are made with accurate information rather than guesswork or assumptions. By analyzing data from multiple sources, businesses can identify trends and correlations that provide insights into how their operations could be improved. This helps them make more accurate decisions that are not based on guesswork or intuition.
2. Increased Efficiency
Data-driven decision making helps businesses save time and money by eliminating the need for manual processes. Automated data analysis tools can quickly identify trends, correlations, and other useful insights that can help businesses make better decisions faster. This reduces the amount of time it takes to analyze data and make informed decisions, allowing businesses to be more efficient in their operations.
3. Better Decision Making Capabilities
Data-driven decision making provides businesses with an objective way to measure performance and identify areas for improvement. By analyzing past performance, businesses can create strategies that are tailored to achieving specific goals or objectives. This enables them to make more effective decisions that are based on facts rather than feelings.
4. Improved Customer Experiences
Data-driven decision making can provide businesses with valuable insights into how their customers think and behave. This allows them to better understand customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. With this information, businesses can create targeted marketing campaigns or product features that are tailored to the specific needs of their customers. By doing this, they can improve customer experiences and increase sales and loyalty.
5. Increased Profitability
Data-driven decision making helps businesses identify areas where they can reduce costs and increase revenues. By analyzing data from multiple sources, businesses can pinpoint areas for improvement that could lead to increased profits over time. This helps them become more financially successful in the long run.
Overall, data-driven decision making is a powerful tool that provides businesses with an objective way to analyze performance and identify opportunities for improvement. By utilizing data-driven decision making, businesses can make better decisions that are based on facts rather than feelings. This helps them become more efficient, improve customer experiences, and increase profitability. The power of data driven decision making should not be underestimated when it comes to running a successful business.
Listen to the Show:
Laura 00:00
Well, let me tell you when it comes to evaluating the success of a marketing campaign, it is so important to prioritize data over feelings. Yet, this is really difficult for many established organizations quickly growing entrepreneurs, you might think of this as maybe a problem that businesses in the beginning stages tend to have. But based on my experience, it is an issue at all stages of business. Because here's the truth, emotions can be really powerful. We've all experienced that in our lives. And it can lead us down the wrong path. All of us dated that wrong person, right in high school before we found Mr. And Mrs. Right. And for that reason, the same principle applies when it comes to growing your organization through marketing and sales strategies. So instead, we need to rely on cold, hard facts, and objective data to make more informed decisions. And that really means taking a good look at metrics that maybe we're not used to looking at, like conversion rates, engagement levels, click through rates. And by doing so we can identify what's working what's not and adjust our strategies accordingly. So that's what I want to be sharing with you today in this episode and stick with me if this is something that you know, you want to get better at.
Laura 01:27
Hello, and welcome to the Next Level Leap podcast. My name is Laura Meyer, and I'm thrilled to be your guide on this journey. With over 20 years’ experience as an entrepreneur and growth strategist for some of the country's fastest growing nonprofit and for-profit organizations, I'm passionate about the power of marketing to create massive positive change in the world. In this podcast, we'll explore how you can use marketing to create a ripple effect of change that will impact lives and communities for years to come. I'm so excited to share my insights and strategies with you and to help you discover how you can use your talents and skills to make a difference in the world. So, let's dive in together and create a marketing ripple effect that will change the world.
Laura 02:09
Hi, my name is Laura Meyer, and I'm a growth strategist to some of the country's fastest growing for profit and nonprofit brands. I'm also a best-selling author, a mom and a wife, a competitive tennis player. And I love talking all things marketing. And if you're new to this channel, make sure that you hit subscribe and say hello, I would love to hear from you. When it comes to looking at your business from a perspective of data over feelings or emotions, this can be really challenging. And trust me, sometimes focusing on data might not always feel comfortable, we might be looking at something that we don't always want to see in our own businesses. And I've certainly been guilty of that myself. But when it comes to winning the game of business, looking at data over feelings is truthfully, what separates the winners from people who struggle and friends, if you're anything like me, you're a high achiever. And when it comes to the game of business, you aim to be a winner. So, I'm going to help you learn how to do that today through the power of data.
Laura 03:18
Now I know many of you might be thinking something along the lines of, but I love using my intuition. My intuition never guides me wrong. My feelings matter about a situation. And I would say that absolutely, of course they do. And many times, I will ask the founder or a CEO or a marketing leader to collaborate with me and ask them, What is your intuition telling you about this approach is this something that you sense would be a fit for your market or for the people that you serve? And many times, they might have an intuition that is based in fear or could be based on all sorts of emotions, or sometimes it's an it's a guided voice inside that is part of the conversation that we want to have when creating a marketing strategy. So, it's not that I'm completely against being able to use only cold hard facts when it comes to growing a business. But when it comes to marketing, it is so important that we are objective and that we are able to see what the data is telling us and that we take the time and the effort to incorporate that into our decision-making process. So, I want to share with you an example.
Laura 04:41
The Dollar Shave Club is a subscription-based razor company that was really struggling to gain market share and a highly competitive market, mainly because it was dominated by established brands like Gillette, you might have heard of them before. And once they realized that they were going to have to really look at the data you know, they thought they had a great product. And of course, they did. They realized that some of their go to market strategies were going to have to be quite different, because they were just not penetrating the market like they wanted to. So, they decided to create a humorous and pretty irreverent ad campaign that you might be familiar with the targeted a younger male audience than the big brands were traditionally serving. However, despite this being a pretty good initial strategy, the first version of their ads didn't even perform well in the pretesting. And the company was just unsure as to whether or not they should even move forward with the campaign and the new messaging. But they decided to use data to inform their decision making at this stage. So, they just conducted an A B test running two versions of the ad, one with a different opening scene and one with a different voiceover. And if you're listening, and you might be thinking, gosh, like would that even make that big of a difference? It did. They then analyze the data from the test and found that the version with the new opening scene and voiceover outperformed the original one by a significant margin. These are two relatively easy, inexpensive things that you can do to an ad campaign when you're just applying data. So based on this new data, they decided to move forward with this new campaign and release the new ad, which quickly went viral and helped the company gain a tremendous amount of market share from the bigger players. So, by using this data to inform their decision making Dollar Shave Club was able to create a successful marketing campaign that resonated with their target audience and differentiated from their competitors. As of my knowledge cutoff date, the exact value of the Dollar Shave Club's company isn't publicly available. However, it was acquired by uni level for reported 1 billion,
which indicates a significant valuation for the company at that time. So, is it worth following the data? Gosh, you know, I would say so.
Laura 07:15
And then the flip side, I want to give you an example from a recent client. About a year ago, we started with a new client with a really successful online membership. And when we onboarded them, one of the first things we identified is they were reaching some what would we would call in the internet marketing space launch fatigue from their existing group of buyers, meaning that they would continually have these big huge launches a couple times a year, but all those launches would do was backfill the attrition, or the members that were leaving in between the launches. So it's pretty frustrating, you know, their growth was plateauing. So we immediately identified one of the ways that they could backfill the members that were leaving as a result of attrition was through what's called an evergreen campaign, meaning people can come in at any time of the year, but under very special and specific circumstances as to not take away from or cannibalize the efforts that were happening during lunchtime. When we looked at the initial results of the Evergreen campaign, from my perspective, they were quite good. The back end of the Evergreen campaign was converting beautifully. I mean, it was incredible, their stick rate was really out of this world, it was around 70%, from a trial that we had set up to the paid membership. If you know anything about back end membership stick rates, you know that that is a phenomenal number. But the take rate on the offer page wasn't very high, it was well below benchmark. And we did some more research, what we found is we never use their best performing sales page as part of the offer to be part of a field free trial. So when I pointed this out to the team, they just wanted to scrap the Evergreen campaign. You know, it's not working, it doesn't bring in clients, we're moving on. And over time, they actually came back to me about three or four months later and said, you know, we were looking at the numbers based on what you had mentioned. And we realized that all it had was a conversion page problem. And I'm like, Yeah, and so there was a lot of time lost in between when I had pointed out what I saw in the data and when the people on the team were really willing and able to look at it from a different perspective than maybe they were used to. And so that was really important to be able to realize in this process.
Laura 09:58
So let's talk about all the reasons why you might not look at the data and why a company or a founder or team might not look at it. The first is emotional attachment. Like it's pretty common for marketers to feel emotionally invested in their campaigns, like we all are emotionally invested in the way that we do things and how attached we are. So they might have put a lot of creative effort into it. And it can be really hard to let go of our ideas around what is and isn't working on our business, particularly, they're not as databased. They're more based on our feelings and our emotions and our attachment.
Laura 10:35
The second is confirmation bias, like sometimes marketers or sometimes teams might unconsciously look for data that confirms their existing beliefs and ignore any data that contradicts it. The truth is, we all want to be right about the things that we want to be right about. That's confirmation bias. Right? If we think that there is a certain type of person that we like spending the most time with, we will be looking for that type of person in crowds just to be able to confirm this is the type of friend I get along with. It's a very simple example. But we do it all the time, it's part of our behaviors, or subconscious. behaviors that are just make up part of who we are. They also might have a lack of understanding. So like not everybody has the same level of knowledge or experience with data analysis. Some marketers might have really advanced skills to advance to analyze data properly, and make informed decisions on it and some might not. And some might feel uncomfortable admitting that they don't have that skill set, which is when a company like joy, brand creative can come in and really help from an outside perspective in a kind and respectful way to the internal team, but also to help skill build within the organization in the ability to look at data. And then time constraints. I think this happens at a lot of companies. This happens at one of our client companies right now, where there's tremendous time constraints, everything is so packed together, and they're doing so much that the marketing campaigns have tight deadlines. So it can make it really hard because you're rushing through the data analysis process, or you're just skipping it altogether, because the next campaign needs to be executed. The funny thing about this is that you actually have to work less and run fewer campaigns, when you are able and willing to dive into the data. So it's in that situation, it's more of a slowing down to speed up type of scenario.
Laura 12:37
And the final is fear of failure. Analyzing data can reveal areas that maybe we're just not even thinking about. And this can be scary for marketers who maybe have their job on the line, or they don't want their campaign or effort to fail. Think about it. For all of these reasons, our judgment can be clouded when it comes to making decisions based on our personal experiences or our emotions. So this is why we need to incorporate as part of the decision making cold hard facts when it comes to making informed decisions about business growth. So how do we do that? First, it starts with being willing to look at and analyze the metrics. This means looking at conversion rates, on pages on emails, engagement levels on content, click through rates on any type of paid traffic or organic traffic, or other key performance indicators as it relates to sales and marketing.
Laura 13:36
So for example, let's say that you launched a marketing campaign that you love. The creative is awesome, the copy is phenomenal, the imagery is beautiful. And everything is working your gut is like we nailed this. I don't know if you've ever had that feeling, but I certainly have. But then you look and you're like actually the click through rates on these ads are really low. And
it's clear that something is not working, something's not resonating. By focusing on the data, we can let go of our emotions around how good we thought that ad was, and focus on improvement and adjust our strategies accordingly. We can also use A/B testing, which is comparison testing that most technologies offer to see which variations of our marketing was working the best. So if this is something that you want to do better in your organization, here are just some simple things you can do to prevent getting swept up in the emotion of it all when analyzing campaigns. The first is define your goals as part of our leap methodology at Joy brand creative. Our first step is always to limit the focus and the next step is to establish a plan. So this is where we define the goals but before we even start collecting the data, we want clear goals for what we want the campaigns or the growth initiatives to Do This will in turn help us inform the right metrics to track for success.
Laura 15:09
The second is to make sure that you're collecting accurate data. And this can be really hard, especially if you're working with multiple platforms that may or may not work together or talk to each other accurately. We've even found that Google Analytics can give us different reporting than Facebook Ads Manager, what we try to do is just pull together the most accurate data that we can. Sometimes it means making two versions of a landing page one for paid traffic, or one for organic or different variations of tags for different partners. Sometimes that setup can be a little bit more on the front end, but it's so worth it to make sure that you have accurate data on the back end.
Laura 15:48
And then finally, you want to analyze regularly and look for trends or look for small things that you can do, that would make a huge impact. There are what I call levers. And in the final stage of the LEAP methodology, this is where we review progress. And what I find is some clients are really, really good about this, they go right to the data, particularly if they have a strong operations leader on the team. The operations leader is often saying we have to look at the data, they're tracking it real time, they're reporting it during the sales Initiative, or campaign or launch. And that is awesome. I love seeing that. Because sometimes you can even adjust things midstream, that make a huge difference in the result. And then other times they'll be a week or two later campaign is over. We're asking the operations team if they have any data, and it's like silent crickets. They're busy. There's other things going on. And I understand that we are all busy. But this is so important. Because the way in which you get unbusy in your organization, and less stressed and being able to do more with less and not working everybody at 100% capacity all the time, is to analyze your data. So really being disciplined about making sure that you're taking the time for it is a critical component and being able to see the type of growth that all of us want to see in our companies and organizations.
Laura 17:30
Now, I know, it's not easy to let go of our feelings and our feelings and a lot of ways have guided us to really great places in our lives. Maybe it was our feelings and our emotions that brought us to our spouse, or gave us that feeling that maybe it was ready time to time to have children or maybe you've even just had an intuitive or emotional connection with somebody or something that's giving you great insight and proved itself to be incredibly right for you. And I have those all the time. I am very much a feeler I'm an E and F j in the Myers Briggs. So shout out to all those feelers out there. But what I found is that over time, as I started to move through the challenges, the mental challenges are the time challenges and looking at the data, or maybe even the story that we're not good at technology. So it's hard to look at data. Once I set all of those aside and said no, we're going to make data driven decisions in our organization. And in the organizations that we serve. I saw exponential growth as a result of that commitment.
Laura 18:41
So next time you're evaluating the success of a marketing campaign, make sure that you're evaluating data over feelings-might not be easy, but it is the best way to make informed decisions that lead to that next level leap of success in your company. So if you loved this video, make sure to let me know or if you have questions, or if you disagree with anything that I said, I'd love to hear from you. I absolutely love two way conversations, and brainstorming and more informed decision making when it comes to business growth. So leave a comment, let me know that you're here. And share your perspective when it comes to data over feelings. And if you've enjoyed this video, I would invite you to subscribe or watch other videos from my channel. When I talk more about how to grow your business in a way that honors you creates those next level leaps in your organization, and is a way in which you can create massive positive impact on the world. Thanks so much for tuning in. And I'll see you soon.
Laura 19:44
Thank you so much for joining us today on the Next Level Leap podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, and that you gained valuable insights from our time together. If you want to see any of the visuals I mentioned in this video, you might want to head on over to our YouTube channel. out where you can see a lot of the things that I'm explaining and in a way that might be a little bit more applicable. And if you want to learn more about our consulting business, make sure to visit joybrandcreative.com. And finally, if you're enjoying this podcast and you want to support our mission of creating a ripple effect of change in the world, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback means everything to us and it helps us reach more people who can benefit from the power of positive marketing. So until next time, keep making waves and spreading joy. I'll see you soon.
Welcome to the Next Level Leap Podcast! Join our guide, Laura Meyer, a 20-year entrepreneur and growth strategist for some of the country's fastest-growing nonprofit and for-profit organizations, as she shares her insights and strategies for using marketing to make a difference in the world. In each episode, we explore how marketing can create a ripple effect of change that impacts lives and communities for years to come. From social media to branding to storytelling, we cover a range of topics to help you harness the power of marketing for good. So if you're ready to make waves and spread joy, tune in to the Next Level Leap Podcast podcast and let's create a marketing ripple effect that changes the world!