You probably use data in a variety of ways in your business, but might not think about using data in your marketing efforts other than to benchmark certain customer behaviors. For example, you might track how many users opened an email, or how much engagement an ad on social media received during a marketing campaign. While there’s nothing wrong with tracking this sort of information, in order to really use data for all it’s worth, it’s a good idea to fold data-driven decision-making and analysis into your overall best practices.
This might sound complicated, particularly if you’re not a data scientist and don’t feel wholly comfortable determining correlations and completing other data analysis tasks on your own. However, with the right data visualization tools, you can use visuals instead of a row of data to find new insights about your business and its marketing efforts. When it comes to harnessing the power of data visualization in your marketing campaigns, there are a ton of different statistical graphics to choose from that can provide you with insight into how things are performing. Here’s a quick rundown of data visualization to learn more about how it helps you utilize big data in a more streamlined manner.
What is data visualization?
Data visualization can sound like a complicated concept, but it’s actually really straightforward. Data visualization, at its heart, refers to using a graphic representation of data rather than traditional spreadsheets. Whether the visual being utilized is a pie chart, histogram, line chart, bar chart, or dots in a scatter plot, being able to present data through an infographic can make it much easier to understand the data you’re analyzing. Humans are much better at understanding visual stories through statistical graphics than they are at understanding raw data. As such, by using a visual display of quantitative information, data visualization offers new possibilities for business users, regardless of whether their title is Marketing Manager or Data Scientist.
How can data visualization benefit your marketing efforts?
Whether you’re trying to make a comparison between different data points or are searching for outliers in a customer satisfaction survey, data visualization can be a major boon. When your data is easier to understand, you’re more likely to act on it. This is why embedding data visualization dashboards into your marketing software can be particularly helpful. When you have a visual display of quantitative information about your clickthrough rate, open rate, and unsubscribe rate for an email campaign, for example, it becomes much more possible to use that information to make changes in your email campaigns. For example, if you just have large amounts of data about open rates based on subject lines, you may get lost trying to distill any actionable takeaways from the data. However, when you begin to look at word choice, capitalization, and other factors, you may realize that more personal subject lines resulted in a higher correlation with the open rate. Being able to use a bar chart and visual analytics right in your email marketing software makes this kind of insight possible, and it’s all thanks to data visualization and integrating these tools with your software.
Data assets can really make all the difference in your business; however, you need to be able to understand data points in order to really get the most out of it. Thanks to advancements in data visualization tools, you don’t have to be a data scientist to understand and analyze various data points—and to use that information visualization to create actionable results in your marketing. From heat maps to other forms of data presentation like information graphics, visual representation can help take your marketing tasks to the next level.
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