3 Tips to Prospect using Big Data

Does it happen to you when you have a huge audience but only a few converted and don’t know why? Are you tracking the right metrics in the context of social media?

Maybe not. But it’s not your fault because there are simply too many things to look at one single campaign. What we need to do before looking at the numbers to make sure that we know what we mean by customer value. From the perspective of IMC analyst, I found two relevant articles that will help you think right and measure right.

Article 1: 7 Ways toAnalyze Data and Evolve Campaigns

This article talks about the rationale behind choosing the right metrics to measure the campaign. Marketers should have a new measurement mindset. Instead of counting ROI of everything, they should focus on insight generation to explore the potential reasons. But in order to find appropriate metrics that align with customer value, we need to align the business goals with customer decision journey, so that the metrics measuring that journey will be able to communicate the insight needed to optimize value.

Article 2: Use data to tell facts, not stories.

This article explains the difference between common metrics including impressions, click, CTR etc. And an important point made in this article is that we shouldn’t use data to complete our own story but interpret data in the way it is. Data should not be used to prove value because it will lead analyst into data manipulation. We don’t want to have presumptions before drawing insight from data and that will only make the conclusion biased with human errors. Data should be used to improve actual customer value instead of providing stories for marketing campaigns.

Call to action:

1. Use data to improve value
2. Align communication goals with business goals
3.  Don’t manipulate data, interpret it

Campaign can only be improved when we use the right metrics and when we use them right.

Professional Summary(LinkedIn):


I’m Hongyu, graduate student in Integrated Marketing Communications program in Northwestern University and my major focus is on marketing analytics. It’s my pleasure to contribute to the marketing analytical community and bring new thoughts into the conversation. And I endeavor to exploit more potential on data analytics in the field of digital media.