Death by 10K (Data) Kittens – A Cautionary Tale
Introduction
Years ago, when I was just starting my career in digital analytics, a company I worked for described a condition often suffered by the most well-intentioned clients. She called this condition “herding the 10,000 kittens.” Clients, she explained, can spend many hours and many resources (and many dollars) trying to tie up all the loose ends of their data. This effort feels good. It feels productive. It feels important to find out where all the cute fluffy bits of data belong and how they are all related.
Where do all the loose ends come from?
Companies have sales data. Digital Marketing platforms provide data to calculate ROAS and tools such as Salesforce or Oracle NetSuite CRM can track customers as they move through the sales funnel. Customer service can look up customer orders. CRM systems can email customers about sales or send seasonal catalogs. Inventory systems can tell the website when products are available for ordering.
Large volumes of data from multiple sources can result in a variety of pitfalls:
With one (and often more, many more) of these pitfalls present, the biggest obstacle to making an impact on the business is TRUST. When one or more of these things is true, the audience stops trusting the data, and therefore, might not trust your analysis. Analysts will spending valuable time accounting for every one of the 10K data kittens, how the data kittens are related, and where they belong.
Unfortunately, spending all that time looking for every single missing data “kitten” comes at a real cost to the business. The data and the patterns change fast – faster than people can chase down the last errant kitten. It stands to reason those 9,999 kittens probably have interesting patterns and behaviors to look at. That one kitten, while probably very cute, is not likely to change much about the others. In other words, the long and often-fruitless search for rogue data bits can result in missing the big picture and thus opportunities to improve performance of future marketing efforts.
How do you avoid Death by 10K Kittens?
The best way to avoid death by ten thousand kittens is to align your marketing activities to the 5 Pillars of Data Driven marketing. Achieving Clarity with stakeholders in the beginning ensures the outcomes at the end meet expectations. Providing documentation, dashboards and delivery efficiency lays the Foundation for trust in data delivery. Designing the process with an eye toward Data consistency ensures data integrity. Using drillable dashboards, test & learn opportunities, and deep dives to derive Insights that drive Action are key to delivering ever-more effective marketing activities over time.
The benefits of being a data-driven marketing organization include being able to:
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- Create Trust
- Trust improves relationships and communication between people and business units (often sales & marketing or finance & product development)
- Gain Momentum
- Automated reports provide momentum to monitor anomalies, drill down, benchmarks, all the good business questions, test and learn
- Build Bridges
- Once you can begin having the fun conversations – talking about the “what if’s”, there can be shifts in thinking about the business, disruptions in assumptions and change can begin to happen
- Acquire Resources
- Even the smallest of successes lead to bigger analytics budgets, better tools, and more marketing dollars
- Create Trust
In conclusion, don’t let your company be killed by the 10,000 not-so-adorable kittens. Take the necessary steps to stay or become a data driven marketing organization so you can keep your kittens in a row, and not waste valuable time trying to track them down. If you are unsure where to start, our consultants are here and ready to help!
