The new data struggle, or, Why you’re still wasting your marketing budget. What brand executives or marketing professionals aren’t seeing from the vast majority of social listening tools, influencer management platforms, and business intelligence firms is any real value. The challenge Even companies that see some value from big data analysis often struggle to use it effectively or even reconcile spending with impact. Understanding basic market trends and where one’s company sits in comparison to the competition only goes so far in deciding how to reallocate marketing budget in the next quarter, choosing where to open the next brick-and-mortar store, or expanding into a new market. Executives in New York, London, or Paris receive glowing updates from joint-venture partners or teams in difficult markets like China or Brazil, or recommendations from those teams to engage in high-priced campaigns with vague promises of success but no proof, and little follow-up. This is, quite simply, because most "influencers" identified by third-party firms or tools aren't actually influential. Do people actually trust the people that an influencer management platform pulls out of its static database? If marketing teams or third-party agencies can’t prove that an individual truly will influence others (or reach an audience that is likely to be influenced), they’re not worth your time or marketing budget. This score incorporates dozens of individual measurements into one consistent score spanning different types of online activity. Ultimately, data is only as valuable to your company as what you’re able to do with it.
The buzzwords never end. A proliferation of tools, platforms, and services now pitch their “social listening” abilities, databases of “influencers,” or “intelligence,” promising companies new ways to augment their marketing efforts and easily tap into new audiences. Platforms dazzle with slick dashboards and videos, startups burst at the seams with smiling salespeople, and testimonials describe recent influencer-attended product launches.
What brand executives or marketing professionals aren’t seeing from the vast majority of social listening tools, influencer management platforms, and business intelligence firms is any real value. Why? Because they’re all doing variations of the same thing and using the same basic pool of data. And why are they doing that? Because it’s extremely difficult to do it any other way.
So in the end, 2017 will be much the same as 2016: companies will continue poring over last quarter’s data for insights while throwing marketing dollars at problems and hoping for the best.
The challenge
Even companies that see some value from big data analysis often struggle to use it effectively or even reconcile spending with impact. Understanding basic market trends and where one’s company sits in comparison to the competition only goes so far in deciding how to reallocate marketing budget in the next quarter, choosing where to open the next brick-and-mortar store, or expanding into a new market.
Across the board, what decision-makers lack is information that ultimately gives them confidence: information that can pinpoint future opportunities and save or make—rather than waste more—money.
What’s also needed is impartial data that spans global teams. Executives in New York, London, or Paris receive glowing updates from joint-venture partners or teams in difficult markets like China or Brazil, or recommendations from those teams to engage in high-priced campaigns with vague promises of success but no proof, and little follow-up. This is, quite simply, because most “influencers” identified by third-party firms or tools aren’t actually influential.
Recently, a European client asked us to look into the impact of an ongoing China-centric marketing effort by their digital marketing partner in Hong Kong. Despite reassurances from the marketing team that their expensive efforts were engaging a vast Chinese audience, we saw little more than a blip in real brand influence or audience enthusiasm, and that blip did not coincide with marketing pushes—indicating that any impact was coincidental, and marginal at best.
Looking at the surface level, as social listening tools generally do, this campaign would have been reported to the client as a success. That’s because these tools can only stick to the superficial, pulling from the same public data sources and calculating the same likes, shares, and comments. Ultimately, the “influential” people identified by that marketing partner in China had follower counts artificially inflated with bots and fake fans, causing our client to waste money marketing their company to a legion of nonexistent people.
When building Enflux from the ground up, we took a significantly different, forward-facing approach that’s far more comprehensive—and difficult—by design.
We did this because of our team’s…
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