Data driven marketing and the streetlight effect

Funny cartoons like this has been around for a long time and we have all enjoyed them. The poor man is looking for his wallet in the wrong place, since it is too dark to look where it actually is. We are smiling and laughing with the poor man – and then doing the same mistake ourselves!

In marketing for example, most companies want to understand the business outcome of the marketing activities. And it is very common to use metrics like website hits or likes on Facebook, just because they are simple the measure. They are under the streetlight, just like the poor man in the cartoon.

Since the objective is to understand the business value, here at Musqot we recommend our customers to use metrics and KPI’s that indicates just that. For example sales revenue, number of leads or pipeline value. These metrics that clearly indicates the marketing ROI can often be found in the CRM system, which is typically being used by sales teams rather than marketing teams. But to find what we are looking for, we need to move away from the streetlight and start looking where the wallet really is.