But what about its actual practical application – how do you use it to boost your sales figures?
Of course, it’s a huge field. But I’ve boiled the answer to this question down into the five tenets of data science that are most relevant to working out how well your marketing campaigns are performing:
Remove the noise
When you have a lot of data to analyse, the easiest option is to go for the average – or the ‘mean’ – to find out what piece of your content is getting the most attention. But this is a simplistic method that can create a problem, as it can be skewed by having too much or not enough data, or by outliers – e.g. a webpage that is getting huge amounts of traffic but without any positive result. All this is data ‘noise’.
Instead, you must look at either the ‘median’ (the middle value of your data) or the mode (the most common value). These avoid the problems caused by mean averages and focus on the most useful statistics.
Confused? Don’t be. Data science has it all in hand, as it cuts through the problems caused by mean averages – it removes the noise – to reveal the mode and median. These are reliable indicators of what is having the most valuable effect and allows you to concentrate your efforts accordingly.
Standard deviation
This theme can strike fear into the maths-averse. So, let’s keep it simple – standard deviation is the opposite of data noise. In marketing terms, it tells you when someone deviates from the norm and looks at something unusual. For example, an investor who always looks at information on the same topic suddenly looks at something completely different. Immediately you have a cross-selling opportunity on your hands. Data science can identify these deviations for you.
Behavioural analytics
In simple terms, this means understanding the client journey and how prospects and investors react to your content. The beauty of data science is that it tracks and analyses this for you, to reveal behavioural nuances that help you divide your database into segments according to like and dislikes. And when you have segments you have the power to send much more tightly focused communications that are much more relevant to each individual, thus far more likely to be read and acted upon.
Clustering
In marketing terms, this means the concept of the word cloud. You can use data science to look at all the themes running through your campaigns and pull out certain words and phrases from your campaigns that are resonating most with your audience. This can be used to produce a word cloud that instantly shows what is working best – both the big attention grabbers, but also the outliers that are creeping into the picture and may be worth some attention.
Negative correlation
Another horribly mathematical phrase. But this can be boiled down to one very useful function – data science uses negative correlation to calculate the prospects within your database who are most actively engaging with your content, but who haven’t yet had contact with sales. This enables you to pull out the hot prospects and present them to your sales team, who then have an excellent chance of converting potential into actual AuM.
