Effective Elements of a Sound Data Strategy

There is no doubt that data is at the center of everything we do today. From grocery shopping to riding Bird scooters across the city, data has ingrained itself as inevitable in our daily lives. A lot of people recognize the importance and value of data but not a lot of people quite understand how to go about using and furthermore leveraging data in the best way possible.

In the Advertising Industry, data is continuing to evolve how marketers think, plan and strategize on a daily basis. Our mission at MBuy has always been to stay ahead of all technological advancements and deploy solutions that allow us to do our work better, faster and most importantly - with the highest level of efficiency possible. The formula to achieving this outcome is dependent on a few key elements – automation, interpretation and application.

Automation

At MBuy, we have a strong dislike for manually performing tasks that are mundane, redundant or repetitive. Rather than exhaust our resources on such tasks, we instead divert our energy and focus towards designing and identifying automated solutions that can be utilized to achieve the same level of outcome.

While it may not be immediately apparent just how much the opportunity cost of wasting resources on unimportant tasks is, having done that analysis, we quickly noticed that in order to succeed, we needed to embrace automation with open arms.

Interpretation

While understanding and interpreting data can be a rather obvious no-brainer, we have noticed that data is more often misinterpreted thus commonly resulting in false assumptions and misdirection. People tend to typically draw the first obvious conclusion they can when it comes to data analysis, failing to recognize the value of having multiple viewpoints and perspectives.

Good data interpretation requires building an A-Class analytics team and developing a set of best practices and guidelines that acts as a thinking process. It's true that creating the framework for such things can take an extended period of time but this is warranted as you are defining the blueprints for the future and growth of your organization - something that should not be taken lightly.

Application

Finally, once you have taken the measures to automate the data and withdraw interpretations, you need to take action. Applying your learnings is a crucial step in the process as it ultimately defines the areas where you are focusing on improving. This can mean anything from optimizing your media buys to forecasting weather trends. Data that is not put to use is essentially data deemed useless.

There truly is no one best approach to using data for insights. The reality is that everyone has their own formula for success which best meets their organization's needs and requirements. The key to success is being able to quickly identify those needs and with the use of data, creating a strategy that pushes you closer to your goals.