Show Notes
“Actionable insights” is a popular phrase that we, as marketers, have heard a lot lately — but what does it mean? Actionable insights are vitally important to the Iterative Marketing methodology but also valuable to overall business success. Documenting and iterating are the keys to the process of discovering actionable insights. “Actionable insights” means that we simplify large amounts of data, put it in a format from which we can interpret information, and formulate a plan for continuous improvement.
What are actionable insights?
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- It is important to understand the relationship between data, information and insights.
- Data is raw and unprocessed facts — either qualitative or quantitative.
- Much data is not even consumable, besides being actionable. It could be thousands of website sessions or hundreds of thousands of ad impressions. It could be every tweet your customers have ever made or hours of focus group transcripts.
- When we process the data, and organize it in a consumable way, it becomes information that we present to our stakeholders in reports and dashboards.
- This information on its own is not insight. It needs to answer a question before it’s insightful.
- For example, if I wanted to know if the majority of our customers were male or female, I have a couple of options:
- I could look at existing information – maybe someone has done this analysis before. Perhaps we have a customer-facing website with Google Analytics on it. All I have to do is go to the demographics report and I have the information I need to answer my question.
- If the information doesn’t exist, I can look to see if the data exists to answer my question – do we have survey data lying around? Is there a form that asks for a salutation?
- If the data doesn’t exist, how can I capture it? Can I run an analysis on first names? Can I administer a survey?
- I could look at existing information – maybe someone has done this analysis before. Perhaps we have a customer-facing website with Google Analytics on it. All I have to do is go to the demographics report and I have the information I need to answer my question.
- For example, if I wanted to know if the majority of our customers were male or female, I have a couple of options:
- Insights Vs. actionable insights:
- Insights can answer a question, while actionable insights drive future action.
- To be actionable, the insight must be:
- Relevant: aligned to key business goals and plan for them.
- Example: Just ask Bic.
- Useful outside of the environment in which it was derived.
- Supporting information that provides context to why this is important or unique.
- Delivered in a timely manner so they can be acted on while they are still relevant.
- Communicated with the right people, otherwise they cannot be applied.
- Relevant: aligned to key business goals and plan for them.
- When we apply actionable insights to Iterative Marketing, we often are either talking about emotional triggers or rational justifications
- Emotional triggers:
- FOMO and Social Proof
- Scarcity
- Reciprocity
- Cognitive congruence
- Authority
- Belonging
- Rational justification (feature and benefits):
- Saves money
- Saves time
- Makes money
- Improves another outcome
- Other psychographic data that can be useful for targeting or making our messages relevant:
- Social Class
- Lifestyle
- Personality
- Opinions
- Attitudes
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Loyalty
- Values
- Emotional triggers:
Documenting & Iterating
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- What do we do with these insights once we have generated them?
- Documenting and iterating for actionable insights often means segmentation or persona development. If an insight is gleaned from too broad of an audience, it is not universally applicable.
- Through documentation and iteration, we strive to round out the psychographic profile of our audience and test our assumptions on how they justify their decision.
- Document any other insights not tied to persona or segmentation that we have discovered. If they are not tied to a persona or a segment, it’s difficult to justify the validity of the insight to our goals as an organization.
- What do we do with these insights once we have generated them?
CHARITY OF THE WEEK:
- Documenting and iterating are keystones in discovering actionable insights, but they are in vain if not done continuously.
- Continuous documenting and iterating means setting up a loop or a cadence to insight-gathering on a monthly or quarterly meeting and meeting with your team to discuss the insights you want to obtain.
- The loop is a series of steps:
- Document the insight you want, and then develop the hypothesis you hope to prove or disprove to get there.
- Determine if you have the data or information to prove or disprove your hypothesis.
- Execute any necessary experiments
- Update persona and segment documentation.
- Share with other business stakeholders.
- Document any questions that come up in the process to readdress in the future.
Summary
- Actionable insights are the missing link between data and business outcomes.
- To be actionable, they must be relevant, useful, have context, substantiated, and delivered in a timely manner.
- Most importantly, actionable insights must be communicated throughout the organization.
- If we do all of this on a continuous loop then we are always getting smarter and always improving.
I want to thank everyone for making a little time for us this week.
Until next week, onward and upward.
We hope you want to join us on our journey. Find us on IterativeMarketing.net, the hub for the methodology and community. Email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net, follow us on twitter at @iter8ive or join The Iterative Marketing Community LinkedIn group.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
►▼Transcription
Steve Robinson: Hello, Iterative Marketers! Welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast, where each week, we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now, let’s dive into the show.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I am your host, Steve Robinson, and with me as always is the informative but never dull Elizabeth Earin. How are you doing today, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: I am good, Steve. How are you?
Steve Robinson: I’m doing well.
Elizabeth Earin: Did you guys do anything fun this weekend?
Steve Robinson: We did. We got our hands on some tickets to — the local symphony put on a show of Fantasia, with the Symphony Orchestra playing the music and then clips from the movie played on a big screen, so they welcomed kids at the performance. So I took my 5-year-old son and we had a great time.
Elizabeth Earin: Did he enjoy it?
Steve Robinson: He really enjoyed it and I actually enjoyed it, though I found myself kind of being sucked into the production that went into it. We don’t really think about how long it took to make things back then. That was 1940 and these were not simple like cartoon character walking across the screen animations. These were super-complicated, lots of stuff moving, trying to emulate the physics of water and stuff like that, and had to be hand drawn frame by frame. And to think that they made a two-and-a-half-hour production on top of all the time that went into recording the music and syncing everything up, it’s just mind-blowing when you think how quick we can just throw something into GarageBand or into iMovie today and quick crank something out.
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah. I love Fantasia because there were so many firsts that happened. I think it was the first time they used color and there are a few other things that they did that — and so to your point, yeah, when you think back and you look at it, we sort of take that for granted now when we have these two-and-a-half to three-hour-long animated films today compared to what they did back then and all of it being done by hand is just phenomenal.
Steve Robinson: Yeah and not to say that there isn’t a ton of art in it today and that there isn’t a ton of time and tedious effort put into making animated fur look like fur, but it’s a different type of production and I am sure not a little bit more intellectually stimulating and not as just grueling as this frame by frame. I can’t imagine the amount of work. So what are we talking about today if we aren’t talking about Fantasia?
Elizabeth Earin: So today, we’re talking about documenting and iterating specifically the keys to discovering actionable insights.
Steve Robinson: Yeah. I think this is an area that we kind of gloss over and throw up buzz words of actionable insights and we never really get into what that means. So I think it’s a great topic to dive in. How are we going to approach it?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah. I think we were going to start by exploring actionable insights and why they’re so important to the Iterative Marketing process. To your point, we talk about it a lot and it’s one of the great benefits of Iterative Marketing, but to your point, we haven’t really touched on it. So we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into that. We’re also going to talk about why documentation and iteration is so important to the process and what that specifically looks like and then also how to make that part of your routine so you’re always improving, always making things better.
Steve Robinson: So the first step is to define this buzzword to throw around actionable insights. The first step is really breaking down what that means from an insight standpoint, right?
Elizabeth Earin: It is, and I think it’s important that we start here because you hear this thrown out all the time in business and analytics and especially when you’re looking at business intelligence software solutions. I was looking at them over the weekend and every other word was actionable insights, but again, it’s one of those buzzwords. Do we really know what it means?
Steve Robinson: Yeah, and if you look at the word ‘insight’, it really comes as a link between data or information and a business outcome. So you have the raw data or the information that comes out of it and then the outcome, and the insight is what connects those two, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, we want to understand the relationship between the data, the information and the insights, and so I think it might make sense for us to take a minute here and sort of break this down.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, so data is raw information. If you try to look at most data sets that we work with, just looking at the individual pieces of information, your brain would go numb and you wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. So examples of this are every little click or session on our website, every last record in our contact database, the individual survey responses that you might get from a large survey that you do. Those are all examples of data and they’re not really usable on their own.
Elizabeth Earin: No. Especially when you talk about as many data points that are out there. When you start seeing so many of them, not only are they not actionable but they’re not even consumable at that point and so you may be looking at thousands of website sessions or hundreds of thousands of ad impressions and so it’s really trying to figure out — take that data and turn it into something that you can use.
Steve Robinson: And so we use software to take that data and aggregate it and combine it with other data sources and distill it down into information that is consumable, that’s palatable to our brains, because again, if we just try to look record by record by record by record, it’s not going to work. It’s not until you put it into a graph or put it into a table and add things up and average things and start to look at the numbers behind it as they are aggregated that it starts to make any sense, and that’s what we call information, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Yes, but even information on its own isn’t necessarily an insight. Information, until it answers a question, it doesn’t have that insight component to it.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, and I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve seen BI dashboards or dashboards to certain applications that — it’s nice, it’s a lot of pretty graphs and numbers but I don’t know what to do with this stuff. It’s just numbers, right? What does this mean? And I think that’s the key missing link is the what does it mean? And so when we use the data and more importantly the information that we are able to distill out of the data to answer a question, that’s when it becomes the insight. And I think it doesn’t really matter if you’re starting with the question and then going out and getting the data and the information to answer the question or if you already have that data and information on hand to be able to answer the question. It’s the answer to the question that makes it an insight and not just data or information.
Elizabeth Earin: So we’ve been talking a little bit abstract here. Do you have an example? Can you provide an example to help put this into context for our listeners?
Steve Robinson: Sure. So let’s just say that we wanted to understand if our customers were male or female. That’s the question that we want to answer. There’s a couple ways we could go about doing this. We may have the information on hand to answer the question out of term without any real analysis because some dashboard somewhere has gender on it as a breakdown based on what’s in our database or what’s in our website traffic for a customer portal or something along those lines where somebody else has already pulled that information together or pulled that data together and analyzed it into information. So there, the information is at our fingertips. We can answer the question. We have the insight. In other cases, that on that question might not be readily answerable based on the data we have at hand or maybe the data is lying around but it needs to be distilled down into information and we need to do some analysis. So maybe somebody ran a survey. We have a bunch of survey data lying around but nobody actually analyzed whether or not more people answered the male question or more people answered male or female. Maybe we need to issue a new survey or a pop-up poll on our website or we need to install something to go and capture third-party data as people interact with something in order to answer this question, in which case, we’re going to do our own data gathering in order to answer the question. Does that help kind of put in more concrete terms?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, I think that does.
Steve Robinson: So, that kind of answers the question of what an insight is. An insight literally answers a question, right? But what makes it actionable?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, actionable insights take that a step further in that it drives future action, and so I think there’s a few things that sort of have to be included in that, that have to be part of this insight that take it to that next level and make it an actionable insight that will drive future action and the first one would be relevance. We have to make sure that the insight is aligned to our key business goals and we have to plan for them. It’s not something that becomes an afterthought. It’s something that is purposely sought out.
Steve Robinson: So that insight, for example, about the gender of our customer base might not be all that applicable if we sell say copy paper or if you recall Lady Bic the pen, right? It’s not really all that useful and could end up really backfiring if we try to use it in that context, so it’s not an actionable insight if it doesn’t apply to our business and our goals.
Elizabeth Earin: Another component that makes it an actionable insight is when it’s useful outside of the environment in which it’s been derived. So we talk about button color a lot because it’s a great example. Which color buttons are most effective isn’t useful outside of the website that we’re talking about the website that we’re testing on. We can’t transfer that knowledge to billboard advertising or to other advertising or to other customer experiences across the organization because it doesn’t have a place there.
Steve Robinson: Same thing would be true about which individual billboards we were running. Which intersections to run billboard ads for the most brand lift is not a piece of information that’s particularly useful outside of billboard advertising, right? So instead, we’re looking for insights that are usable outside of the medium. So if we find out something about our audience about how they tick, what makes them do what they do, that can be picked up and lifted outside of the environment in which we tested it. So which features and benefits are most effective? Which emotional triggers are they most apt to respond to? We can take that information and apply it across multiple different mediums outside of the medium we derived in. I think the third thing is that you absolutely have to have enough supporting information to run with that insight. We. as marketers, aren’t just as fallible and this is anybody else in that we will see anecdotal information. We will see one customer testimonial or customer complaint and immediately pick it up and go, “Ooh! We can use that,” and then run with it. But the reality is if you don’t have sufficient data to support something, it’s not actionable. It’s just fodder for another experiment or something that you need to go out and verify or learn, right?
Elizabeth Earin: I think it’s a great point. I am sort of smiling here because I have done this multiple times and you swear you’re not going to fall prey to it and then it happens because there’s this one piece of information that just stands out from everything else and there’s a reason that it’s standing out. It’s because it’s an outlier. It’s not the norm.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, and we love surprising, new information, so it’s particularly apt there. The next thing that we need to know is that what’s the context to the insight because, just because we learn a new piece of information or fact that we know is impactful to our business doesn’t mean we know how it’s impactful to our business. I think you had a great example of this, Elizabeth, the Dollar Shave Club, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah. We’ve talked about Dollar Shave Club before. It’s one of our sort of, I think, favorite case studies to sort of bring up but Dollar Shave Club had noticed that many of their subscribers were women but they didn’t know if it was because they were purchasing for the men in their lives or they were purchasing for themselves, so without that supporting information that they were purchasing for themselves, which is what it turned out to be, it wasn’t an insight. It was just information, and without having that information, without knowing why they were making that purchase, who it was for, they couldn’t use that to then make changes to their marketing strategy or changes to their operations to help capitalize on that.
Steve Robinson: And now if you’ve caught any of their latest ads, and I think Harry’s picked up on the same thing, they’re now both marketing to women because they’ve noticed that women actually were subscribing for themselves. So the next item that is on our checklist of what makes an insight actionable is timeliness. It’s amazing how fast information becomes irrelevant as the business climate changes, as your business itself changes, and you may find that your target audience shifts over time and the insights that you gathered two to three years ago just aren’t as applicable today as they were back then because either who you’re selling to has changed because you’re selling to a different group of people or that group of peoples’ consumer habits have changed. And we are in a particularly tumultuous time right now when it comes to people’s media consumption habits and our interactions with technology. And how we even fundamentally make decisions is changing today, and so you have to be very careful about what you carry over for too long.
Elizabeth Earin: I would even argue it goes beyond just how long you have the data or how old it is but seasonality can impact that as well. Insights that you gain in the pre-holiday season aren’t necessarily going to be applicable in post holiday season, and so there’s different things you want to keep in mind when you’re taking a look at that and drawing those insights.
Steve Robinson: That’s a great point. I hadn’t thought about that.
Elizabeth Earin: And finally — and this is my favorite one — is that actionable insights must be communicated with the right people. If they’re not, they can’t be applied. And so if you are operating within a silo, if you’re keeping your information within marketing, then you’re not realizing the true potential of these actionable insights. If you were to share this with research and development or a new product development team or your sales team or even your operations team who has people who are dealing front line with your customers, these are all people that can benefit from actionable insights. And so you want to make sure that you are sharing that throughout the organization.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, that could even happen within your own marketing group. We’ve worked with clients where they have a big enough team or they’ve got different agencies involved and information can be siloed even within different groups within marketing, so it becomes really important to get this written down someplace and a report and/or a permanent repository where it can be picked up elsewhere.
Elizabeth Earin: That is a great point. Thanks, Steve.
Steve Robinson: So how does this tie back to Iterative Marketing and what we’ve been sort of preaching in this whole podcast?
Elizabeth Earin: Yes, so when we apply actionable insights to Iterative Marketing, we’re often talking about one of two things, either emotional triggers or rational justifications.
Steve Robinson: And emotional triggers, these are the things that cause us to act because — and I’ve harped on this in multiple episodes before, but at our base, we are somewhat animalistic in how we make decisions and what triggers us to act, in that it’s usually an emotionally-driven action that causes us to move, right? And so examples of some of these are things like fear of missing out. Or social proof: Wanting to be part of that crowd, right? The idea of scarcity: If I don’t get it now, it’s not going to be there later. Or reciprocity: You gave me this great piece of this great tool to white paper, I now think better of your brand and want to help you in return. There’s lots of other ones, cognitive congruence, authority, sense of belonging. There’s all these little buttons that we, as marketers, either consciously or inadvertently push to get our audiences to act, but our audiences are all different and they’re going to respond differently to different triggers. And sometimes these triggers can backfire and our audience can feel manipulated or used. Sometimes, they can be really effective in getting them to act and so part of developing insights in an iterative process is testing different triggers and figuring out which ones are most effective, which ones move our audience and which ones backfire.
Elizabeth Earin: The second one we mentioned was rational justification. And it’s funny because this weekend, this actually stopped me from making a purchase. I fell prey to the social proof piece of that — a girlfriend was talking about wanting a new pair of Ugg boots. I don’t need Ugg boots but she was talking about and got me excited and that’s where my rational justification came in. And it actually kept me from buying it, so it kind of backfired a little bit there. But rational justification is when we’re talking – is what we’re using to backup why we’re doing it. It’s the reason sort of justifying why we should make this purchases, and oftentimes, it comes down to saving time or saving money or it makes us money when we’re looking at our B2B side or improves another outcome in your life.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, I did the same thing. Popped up on Amazon that a pair of car mounts for my cell phone were on sale and I’m like I kind of thought about those in the past. They’re on sale. I should buy them now because they’re cheaper, so that was the first justification, right? I don’t really need the car mount for my cell phone in my car, but I bought it and the second justifications is I’m getting a new car, so I need new car mount which makes zero sense, but our brains are quick to fill in the gaps to figure out why we need something that we decided that we needed in the heat of the moment.
Elizabeth Earin: And to your point earlier, really understanding our audience and which of these triggers are setting them off can help us to produce more effective marketing messaging going forward.
Steve Robinson: A lot of people think, well, this emotional, rational business applies — that makes sense in B2C where we’re making impulse buying decisions or we are buying because we like things, but what about in the B2B environment? And our experience has been that this is just as true if not more so when B2B. It changes a little bit of the rational justification because you’re not necessarily just trying to justify it to yourself. You might also be justifying things to other stakeholders within the organization, but that’s really no different when I have to turn to my wife and explain why I spent how much money on what I spent it on, right?
Elizabeth Earin: And there’s other psychographic data that can be useful for targeting or making your messages more relevant, and this includes social class, lifestyle, personality, opinions, attitudes, interests, hobbies, loyalties, values. These are all the types of things that we like to document in our personas and that carry through to our customer journeys.
Steve Robinson: And those are really helpful as you refine and build upon those when you have to come up with compelling messaging and you want to relate to your audience and you want to really better empathize with them and be inside their world and understand the context in which they’re going to receive your message. All these little layers and details which may not seem as actionable of an insight at the time, if it gets you closer to your target audience, if it helps you see the world from their eyes and feel the earth through their shoes then that’s actionable. That helps you be a better marketer and it’s worth gathering.
Elizabeth Earin: Definitely. So what do we do with these insights once we’ve generated them?
Steve Robinson: So the first key is documenting them and we look at when we gather these insights, generally they tie back to a specific audience or at least we want them to tie back to a specific audience. So if things are going well, this ties back to an individual persona and you’re able to just simply update that persona document but it could be that ties back to a different segmentation of your audience along some other line than persona. Maybe if you are B2B in industry or B2C, it could be a different product set or something along those lines.
Elizabeth Earin: I think the key here, though — I just wanted to touch on something you said — is that it ties back to a segment. Because if it doesn’t tie back to segment, if you’re trying to apply it to your audience as a whole, we run into some issues there.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, yeah. If you try to glean insights on too broad of an audience, it becomes very hard to make blanket statements or generalizations that, in turn, are the insights that you’re trying to gather. Because all of a sudden, you start poking at the outliers and you start saying, well, that isn’t always true if we look over here. And suddenly, you might have data that even negates the very insight that you’ve gleaned because you’ve got one group of your audience that’s very true about but the other group of your audience is very untrue. And so all the sudden, those two things cancel each other out and you’ve got zero insight. So it becomes very important to narrow in on smaller segments of like people within your audience which is generally the segmentation you are using for your marketing and your advertising anyway.
Elizabeth Earin: Ultimate goal in documenting everything is really to round out the psychographic profile and test those assumptions on how they justify — how our customers are justifying their decisions. And when we do this — or we do this through documentation and iteration, that’s really the key of getting to the heart of these of these insights.
Steve Robinson: So should all of our insights tie back to our persona or customer journey or some other segment?
Elizabeth Earin: I was going to actually ask you that same question. I think this is where it gets a little bit complicated, because we want to come up with these actionable insights that can apply across the organization. But to the earlier point, if we go too broad, are we setting ourselves up for failure?
Steve Robinson: And more importantly, at least within marketing, can we even use them, right? Because if we’re doing our jobs on the personalization front, if we’re doing our jobs on aligning our media to an individual segment in their customer journey and aligning our creative in our content and all of our output, then if our insights are not aligned to the same segments that we are marketing to and ultimately that the whole business should be serving, then it becomes really hard to apply them because they don’t fit in the same boxes that we’ve put our prospects and customers in.
Elizabeth Earin: Let’s maybe talk about this — give an example here and help our listeners really understand this little bit better. If I’m specifically in B2B marketing and I’ve decided that LinkedIn — or I have determined that LinkedIn is a great channel. And so I say I am going to use it universally across all of my audiences that I serve, this is probably not a true segment unless I have tested across all of those segments individually, correct?
Steve Robinson: Yeah, and we will often, as marketers, fall into this trap. We will do our jobs as far as testing with a small audience and then immediately assume that, because we had great results with that small audience, that the same insight is applicable outside of the box that we tested it in without going and testing elsewhere. When the reality is: We find out that LinkedIn works great with Garys. I am making up a persona name here. And Garys respond really well on LinkedIn. That doesn’t mean that Julies are going to respond as favorably, and that’s just another reason for us to now replicate the same test with Julies, to see if Julies are as stronger or weaker in the results of LinkedIn.
Elizabeth Earin: So to your point, we will replicate that test with our Julies and then, based on the outcome of that, if it works or it doesn’t work, we’re going to go back and we’re going to update our internal documentation to reflect what we’ve now learned about our new audience.
Steve Robinson: Exactly, exactly. So I think this is a great opportunity for us to take a quick break and go help some people, so let’s do that.
Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue, I would like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small but meaningful favor. This week, we would like to highlight Amazon Smile. If your nonprofit organization is looking for a way to raise additional funds, Amazon Smile may be a good option. It is a website operated by Amazon that donates half a percent of all eligible purchases to the charitable organization selected by the customer. Learn more at org.amazon.com or visit the link in the show notes. Next week, we will return to listener-submitted causes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast, please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the “Share a Cause” button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.
Steve Robinson: And we are back. So, before the break, we talked a lot about what an actionable insight is and how to make sure that the insights that we’re gleaning are both insights and not just information, and that they’re actionable and we can apply them. But I think we skipped a key element of this actionable insight, especially as it relates to Iterative Marketing. Do you want to touch on that a little bit, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: Yes, yes, definitely. We left out that it needs to be continuous, that we need to continuously be documenting and iterating and that that continuous documentation and iteration is the key to discovering those actionable insights. And what this means is that we need to set up a loop or a cadence to our insight gathering, whether it be a monthly or quarterly meeting where we meet with our team to discuss the insights that we want, to obtain or we are simply setting reoccurring milestones or to-dos on our to-do list. Either way, we’re making sure that we are regularly checking back in and that we are regularly testing and that we are regularly documenting this information.
Steve Robinson: Let’s go through a loop that we’ve set up with our clients, and I’ll admit we are at various stages of implementing this loop with individual clients and it’s certainly not something that you have to do all at once, but you want to get as many components of this in place as possible and then continue to refine. The key thing is making sure that you’re doing it in a loop, right? So, the first step is documenting the outcome that you want to achieve. What is your hypothesis and what question are you trying to answer? And oftentimes, you’ll find that if you have a question that you want to answer, but then you can’t seem to come up with a hypothesis that perhaps this isn’t going to be that insightful of an insight when you get to the other side, right? But this is key, because if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re never going to find it.
Elizabeth Earin: Definitely. And then the next thing you want to do is determine if you already have the data or information to prove your hypothesis. We’ve come across this before, where we want to know something, so we want to set up an experiment. But when we go back and we look at some of the information we’ve gathered in the past, we actually already have this information at our fingertips and it just needs to be reviewed and gone through. So first, you want to make sure that you don’t already have this information.
Steve Robinson: And then you want to execute any experiments or other data gathering that you need to do. And we’re big on experiments. You can go back and listen to the episodes, the podcast that talk about experiments; we will link this in the blog posts and in the show notes as well. But sometimes, an experiment isn’t necessarily the best way to get the information and you might need to run a poll or a survey or do some other fact-finding to get the data that you need in order to be able to prove or disprove your hypothesis.
Elizabeth Earin: And once you’ve done this, you want to update your persona and segmentation documentation. Again, we want to make sure that we are documenting the insights that we’ve gleaned from our data.
Steve Robinson: Once you’ve updated your own internal records on the segment that you gained an insight for, now you want to make sure that you communicate this outside of your little world. So whether that’s your group within the marketing team or it’s the entire organization, you need to make sure that you’re publishing your insights, your findings in regular reporting.
Elizabeth Earin: I think the final sort of step to this loop is you want to make sure that you’re documenting any additional questions that come up in the process. And this can either come up once you start gathering insights and it leads to additional questions, or this could be that 2 AM, wakes you up in the middle of the night and you have this epiphany of a question that you want to make sure you document. You want to find a place to keep these questions so that, when you’re looking for your next experiment, you make sure that you are pulling from questions that have kept you awake at night.
Steve Robinson: And this is one of the beautiful parts about setting up this loop or cadence, is that you’ll find that the first few times you do this, you’re really struggling or reaching for, well, what insight do I want to gather? I am stuck. I can’t think of something that I need to know or what’s most important for me to know right now. And then all of a sudden, you’ll find that, for every insight you gather, it raises two or three more questions. And then you’re thinking along these lines and you are getting those flashes when you’re in the shower of, “No, wait, wait. We don’t really know this about Julie, do we? So we need to go back and verify that.” And all of a sudden, your tickler file is in actually really long, and now you have a whole bunch of insights that are in your list to go and gather for your next meeting.
Elizabeth Earin: And this doesn’t have to be a complicated document. We actually use an Excel spreadsheet that we just keep things running for — the entire team has access to it, and so we just plug in questions. And I do recommend that you be as descriptive as you can in that question, because we’ve had a few times where we’ve had a somewhat vague question and couldn’t remember what we were trying to get out with it. But coming back to one of Steve’s points earlier is that you do have to really make the effort to make this happen, because as we get wrapped up in our day-to-day activities that we’re doing of running our departments and meeting the needs of our internal and external stakeholders, this is one of those things that can fall by the wayside and we don’t want it to. There is so much opportunity. There’s so much upside if we are continuously experimenting and continuously improving, and it builds on itself. And so you really want to make sure that you are making time to make this a priority within your marketing department.
Steve Robinson: Absolutely, absolutely. Well, let’s kind of run through the key points that we talked about today, because we talked about a lot. So actionable insights are a couple of things. On the insight end of things, they’re the link between data and a business outcome. And then to be actionable, they have to tie back to an actual business need. They have to have some context. They have to be substantiated by data. We can’t be looking at anecdotal information here. And they have to be delivered in a timely manner or relevant to the timeframe that we’re executing the insight for. And then finally, none of this happens if you don’t make it happen, and the best way that we found to make it happen is to set it up on a continuous loop or cadence. So set a regular meeting, a regular milestone, something like that that’s going to bring it back to it. And keep a tickler file of future experiments or insights that you want to garner about individual segments or audiences so that you’re never short of ideas when that meeting or milestone occurs. That way, we always continue getting better and smarter and faster. So on that note, I want to thank everybody for making time again for us this week. We always appreciate it. We don’t take your time for granted. And until next week, onward and upward.
Elizabeth Earin: If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube or your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you will also find the Iterative Marketing blog in our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. You can also follow us on Twitter. Our username is @iter8ive or email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net. The Iterative Marketing podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by Seastock Audio Music Production and Sound Design. You can check them out at Seastockaudio.com. We will see you next week. Until then, onward and upward!
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