Data Visualization in Marketing: 5 Key Steps | eWEEK - eWeek

Modern marketers are presented with a vast amount of data that requires careful analysis to identify new trends and offer the best customer service. The data could be from within your organization, the market, or competitors. Insight from this data guides businesses in making key decisions – and gaining competitive advantage.

But sifting through this sea of unorganized data can be an overwhelming task. You could easily miss obvious patterns or possible errors and end up with a flawed analysis.

To help, data visualization can convert complex data into a visual format for a quick grasp and analysis. Clearer presentation of information helps you make accurate decisions and better marketing plans.

Also see: Top Data Visualization Tools 

What Is Data Visualization? 

Data visualization is the process of presenting data through a chart, graph, or any other form of visual context. You can visualize the data as a whole or just the relevant sections that you want to focus on at the moment. This allows staffer – especially non-tech staff – to understand and analyze the data better than with plain text or numbers in a table.

In the workplace, data visualization enables you to absorb complex sets of data and derive key insights quickly. From this analysis, you can create meaningful marketing campaigns and make informed business decisions.

Also see: What is Data Analytics?

The Use of Data Visualization in Marketing

Marketing teams can utilize data visualization in almost all phases of outreach, including: processing data that has been collected, creating a marketing strategy, and analyzing the performance of the marketing strategy.

Here are five ways marketers use data visualization to their advantage:

1. Conversion of Complex Data into Digestible Format

Data in a spreadsheet is tiring to the eyes and brain because you need to be fully attentive to identify the important information. A few seconds of absent-mindedness and you miss a key figure that could identify a trend or an outlier.

Once the same information is presented as a graph, it's easier to interpret the data and identify patterns and connections between various factors.

Marketers can use this feature to convert the raw data collected from the market to a format that's simple to understand and analyze. It's easier to analyze customer preference and company performance that way. This insight enables you to collaboratively create new effective marketing strategies and improve old ones.

Also see: Top Data Mining Techniques 

2. Creating Customer Profiles

Modern marketing demands understanding your customers' preferences to customize your services and products. If you don't cater to their tastes, your competitor will. This use of digital tools to cater to buyers is a core element of digital transformation. 

Successful marketing teams need to create profiles of their customers. The profile can be categorized by traditional demographics such as age, gender, and location. You can create other modernized categories, for example, based on the social media platform they use or the channel, link, or advertisement that led them to your site etc.

Visualizing the data on all these demographics will help you create accurate profiles of your customers. It will give insight on how different customer groups react to specific marketing strategies, profiles that are more likely to be returning customers, and most popular products among specific groups.

This information guides the marketing team through creating personalized services for the customer. It's also important for effective, data-driven targeted ads optimized for specific target customers.

3. Analyzing Marketing Strategies

After creating and implementing marketing strategies, you need to analyze what worked and what didn't. At the start of any marketing campaign, you should have specific and measurable goals. These will serve as your basis for post-marketing analyses.

Unfortunately, raw data can be misleading during such analysis. A certain advertisement may appear to be successful in generating leads to your site. But once the data is visualized in a graphic that maps the customer journey to the end, you realize that most of the leads from that channel don't convert to purchasing customers.

Also see: Top Data Analytics Tools 

4. Assess and Improve the Performance of Various Platforms

Most marketing today is done digitally via social media posts, blogs, and websites. But – surprise – marketing platforms such as mass and printed media are still popular and effective. Clearly, you cannot allocate equal resources for all of these platforms. Instead, identify the most effective platform for your product, based on the nature of your target audience.  

You can do this by assessing the sales results attributable to each platform versus the resources used to attain the results. Visualizing the data (e.g., in graphs) will highlight the platforms with the best return on investment (ROI). Even among similar platforms such as social media, zero in on specific sites and assess their performance. The poor performers can be discarded while those with better results are allocated more resources.

5. Improve Website Conversions

A user's experience on your website determines the type and length of interaction they will have with your site and product. A site that is difficult to navigate, slow to load, or an inconvenience in any other way will drive customers away before purchasing or subscribing. A site with a high bounce rate loses out on revenue and also ranks low in search engine results. 

That's why you need to assess the users' journey on your website, identify the pain points, and eliminate them to improve the customer experience. Visualized data will help you identify whether pertinent issues are coming from the website itself.

There are also external factors you can work on. For example, your choice of a web host could affect the loading speed of your site. If you realize this is the case, change to a more reliable alternative to stop losing potential customers.

Such assessments and improvements on the site ensure your conversion rates keep rising – but again, you must monitor this constantly. 

Also see: Best Data Mining Tools 

Conclusion: Always Keep Analyzing 

Modern businesses are run on data from within their systems, from competitors' sites, the market, and customers. Every business is, therefore, allocating resources to collect data to outdo their competitors, and so should you. But the data is unhelpful if you can't analyze it properly or get accurate insight to guide your decisions.

Data visualization makes it possible for you to make sense of the data and also explain it to your team and stakeholders – easily and with visual support. 

About the Author: 

Jerry Low is the founder of WebRevenue.