The lightning-fast speed at which global news moves today means that marketing and communications professionals must try harder than ever to keep up.

Internet trends over the past decade show that almost universal adoption of meme culture and an explosion of easily created trend-able content, through platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and more recently Tik-Tok, have made it increasingly difficult to separate legitimate ‘newsworthy’ content from vapid internet ‘chaff’.  

With more facets of marketing and communications moving to a digital space, it’s no surprise either that data trails left by consumers traversing the internet are akin to gold being left at the bottom of a riverbed.

Digital marketing professionals and the powerful analytics tools they use to sift through the data can be thought of as ‘gold panners’, rigorously checking and re checking that surfing data to find the most valuable ‘nuggets’ to inform and help devise more thoughtful and powerful marketing strategies.

Some analysts suggest that in our increasingly data-driven world, each of us generates 1.7 megabytes of data every second, with up to 90% of that data remaining unstructured.   

Quality over quantity

Unlike gold, more data isn’t always better. Instead, the true value of data comes from it being analysed, interpreted, and then applied effectively to marketing and communications strategies.

However, given the ever-increasing pace of the digital world, time is ever shorter for marketers to extract and act upon insights gleaned from data. As a result of this, real-time data has become ever more valuable, and industry disruptors such as mobility brand Lyft and online food order/delivery brand GrubHub have built their entire business model and marketing strategies around ‘Big Data’, choosing to pioneer a highly personalised service to customers and automate large portions of its decision making through data driven technologies.

Access to high quality, real-time data enables a marketing and communications team to create campaigns utilizing powerful keywords and formatting to boost levels of engagement or serve highly receptive segments of an audience. Data on mentions, shares, clicks, likes and overall audience sentiment are all being collected in real-time.

Brands participating in data driven campaigns can engage with and react to customers through social media platforms during the campaign’s lifecycle, further enhancing audience engagement through Twitter hashtags, Instagram stories and other means towards taking a branded post ‘viral’.

By allowing data to inform your own marketing strategies it is easier to identify the top performing content delivery channels, enabling you to then prioritise top-ranking influencers, journalists, and platforms to distribute your content.

Keeping up with the times

As ever-increasing proportions of marketing and communications become centred around data, the need to keep up with these changes increases exponentially – or risk being left behind. And data is no longer the realm of analysts and experts only, as more than ever we see communications professionals and clients alike expecting detailed breakdowns of marketing metrics, such as audience engagement, growth, and conversion rate at each stage of a campaign’s lifecycle.

The archaic perception that marketing communications is an immeasurable and immutable artform, which can then be interpreted to suit a desired result simply doesn’t stand scrutiny in the modern age of data first marketing strategy.

Instead, it can be accurately measured against a predefined list of parameters and then rated against past or present marketing activities.

If you can replace human instinct with objective data you are better placed to create highly customizable campaigns, centred around the personalised messaging and relevant content a modern-day audience has come to expect.