WHY ARE ANALYTICS CRITICAL TO CREATING AND BUILDING A BRAND

WHY ARE ANALYTICS CRITICAL TO CREATING AND BUILDING A BRAND?

            Analytics provide a road map to marketer as they create and build strong brand.  Analytics tell a marketer what is happening, what is not happening, and why. Best of all, analytics do these things in real time, as you are engaging. A marketer now has a means to know when to pull the plug when money is not being used wisely. Boards are becoming stricter. The people who run the organizations that we work for want to know where the money is going, and how effective it was.

            Marketers have traditionally been ambivalent about numbers.  Marketers are by nature activist people. They like to do things. In times past they had no idea if something was working. In the social media era, marketers have the cold facts that tell them if something is working and, more importantly why something is working.

            Social media is about creating friendships. Friends make promises to one another.  The keeping of promises is the means by which strong relationships are created. What is true in our personal lives is also true in our business lives, especially in the marketing area. Marketing revolves around making promises. Strong customer service revolves around making sure the promises are kept. Social media manages conversation in contrast to old media in which conversations were controlled.

            In social media, we can observe what people are doing, what they are really doing.  A picture is worth a thousand words and by monitoring closely our social media sights, people can readily observe what people “like” and what they don’t like.

            In social media we converse with our customers. Analytics tells us what that conversation brought out. The conversations lead to prioritized insights. Through analytics, we know the best times to reach our most valued customers. We know what these customers value the most. We know what the best times to have the most staff are.  Labor is the most expensive cost that an organization has. Through social media platforms, we know when the high volume times are and when the volumes are less.

            Analytics directs the conversation. The conversations that we now have on social media platforms connect all our conversations together.  They organize the conversations. Analytics give a marketer a road map in identifying adverse conversations and beneficial ones. Analytics allow us to move away from what we think, to objective data that allows us to identify the weak areas of our brand and make these weaknesses strength.  Through analytics, we are able to create a well-positioned, differentiated brand that is set apart from all the other products in our market space.

Dean Hambleton

dnhambleton@gmail.com