Picture this: you recently launched a huge social media campaign to drum up some excitement for the grand opening of a new location for your business, however, on the big day itself, you received a much lower amount of customers than you estimated! You did everything right, using cohesive branding, communicating with your audience, and even making a personal hashtag for the whole event. The data shows that, by all accounts, it should have been a successful opening.
Just as you’re about to call it quits, you take one last look at the local news and realize there was a huge road closure in your area. It wasn’t that your campaign hadn’t worked, it was an external factor that affected your business. After all our experience working with different businesses, we’ve noticed this problem again and again, how it’s so easy to forget that data we usually don’t consider can have such a huge impact on our brands! Let’s go over what to look out for, and how you can start using this data to your benefit.
The biggest example of this in recent memory is Covid, an external factor that had an impact on almost every business in the world. This concept, however, can be seen a lot more commonly than you’d think, and in much smaller cases.
When it appears that something in your marketing failed, but there’s no evidence pointing to it, take a look at your surroundings or the news and you may just start to find what actually put you off course. When our founder, Mindy, was running a marketing campaign around summer yarn for a local craft store, she noticed how sales were far lower than predicted. When she took a look out the window, however, the answer immediately became clear to her. Colorado had been having an unnaturally long winter, and it was still snowing outside!
The craft store was trying to market summer yarn, but its audience was still trapped in winter, and no matter how cohesive the marketing is, there’s still going to be a huge disconnect because of the weather.
This “unrelated” data can come from all over the place, from road closures, to weather, to pop culture, and even other businesses not even in the same field as you. When planning a step in your marketing plan, it’s useful to consider what external factors might play a role in the turnout. Once you have those figured out, you can then look at current and past trends, and use that data to make informed decisions on how to go about your plan.
When it comes to making data-driven decisions, you can’t be biased with what you do and don’t factor in. With as much as there is going on in the world, there are so many possible elements that could be playing a role in your brand’s marketing success. By researching what these elements might be and preparing for them, you’re toughening up your plan for whatever roadblocks might be thrown your way.
