How to Turn Extensive Data into Actionable Insights

In recent years, there has been a significant growth in the number of analytics. While many content creators may find this helpful, it poses a challenge for digital marketers. When you have a lot of data, it's easy to focus on vanity metrics rather than the data that truly matters to your business. 

According to a McKinsey report, despite an increase in the amount of data, marketers still struggle to understand their audiences effectively. This is because companies continue to use outdated data to inform their decisions. In this article, we will guide you on how to use analytics to turn social media conversations into actionable insights.

What is Actionable Insights?

When you collect data through social listening, there is a particular information you are looking for. The information that you extract from data is the actionable analytics. It involves using data to optimize your business, improve customer experience, and increase revenue. 

To be considered actionable, analytics should provide relevant, clear, and actionable insights that are useful for decision-making. This involves a good understanding of your business goal, its key performance indicators (KPIs), and the sources of data that can help you achieve the goal. 

There are numerous areas where you can gain actionable insights, including social media metrics, website analytics, and customer feedback. Brand voice audits can ensure you are speaking to the right audience, and businesses can analyze the data to gain insights into patterns, trends, and opportunities for improvement. They can make informed decisions in various areas, such as product development and marketing campaigns.

If you want your business to remain competitive in a data-driven marketplace, you need to leverage actionable insights. This can help businesses develop well-optimized strategies that deliver better performance and ensure higher levels of success.

Steps in Turning Conversation Data Into Insights

It's one thing to collect the correct data, but quite another to make it useful. If you want to make good use of data, use these steps:

Measure the Right Data

To get the most out of your data, ensure that you collect a variety of data. For instance, some of the data that an e-commerce site may want to track are:

• The channels driving the most conversations.
• Your leaking buckets (places where most website visitors bounce off).
• The number of devices that customers use before purchasing a product.
• Landing pages requiring a revamp.

Consider what you find helpful for your business and ensure that you ask the correct questions.

Use the Segmentation Method

Segmentation can be a valuable method for taking action on data. This method involves grouping customers with the same attributes together to help you dig deeper into the data. Select the segments you want to study depending on the answers to your business needs. By understanding segments, you will gain a clearer picture of your customers' behaviors, which will be key to your optimization plan.

Some tools, such as Google Analytics, help a lot in creating built-in segments and customizing them to your needs.

Convey Your Message Using Clear Visuals

You may have the correct data story, but if you present it incorrectly, the outcome will not be favorable. If your presentation consists only of words and numbers, it will be difficult for people to grasp. On the other hand, the use of images, infographics, and charts make data easy to process. Ensure your data story is well-articulated, conveying the how, what, and why behind it.

Discover the Data Set Context

At times, you can capture data that is mainly driven by people’s opinions. That is why the best decisions often result from an understanding of the data set. This is why it is essential to understand the context in which the data is presented. You can ask different data contextualizing questions, such as:

• What is the meaning of these numbers?
• Why is this data important?
• Does the data affect my business?
• How is this data collected?

Without understanding the context, it can lead to poor business decisions due to incorrect interpretation. 

Data Optimization Plan

The DMAIC is an acronym of the six processes that make up the process and stands for:

• Define. You need to define the challenge you want to fix, the existing improvement opportunities, and the customer needs. In this step, it is helpful to have a project charter defining the scope, focus, motivation, and direction of the improvement team. The customer voice provides customer feedback and the value stream.
• Measure. You want to consider how the project is currently performing. This stage can provide you with key indicators of the project's health throughout its lifetime. The data collection team focuses on lead time and the quality of the services customers get from the process. Therefore, they measure and define current performance against the baseline process. 
• Analyze. This involves tracking the cause of the problem. If you try to solve a problem you don't understand, you will not perform well. Therefore, begin by tracking the root cause of the process issues. 
• Improve. After determining the cause of the problem, the team can now focus on identifying the root cause. During this stage, the team focuses on refining their ideas and implementing solutions. They also collect data to find out if there is any meaningful improvement. With a well-structured improvement strategy, the team can implement innovative changes that will enhance the baseline and customer experience. 
• Control. The goal of this stage is to ensure that the improvements are sustained. After the improvements are implemented and the issue with the process is addressed, the team should seek ways to maintain these gains and update them on a regular basis. That is why there is a need for a monitoring plan that tracks the success of the updated process and creates a response plan when performance declines. After implementing the process, the process owner continues to monitor and update it to meet the changing trends. 

Final Thoughts

With so much data circulating, there is a need to transform this data into actionable insights; otherwise, the entire data collection process remains useless. However, when your data becomes actionable, you can use it to take your brand to the next level. If you are unsure of how to do that, our detailed guide will prove helpful.