Avoid Analysis Paralysis with this simple plan – #marketingautomation
Back when I was in college, earning a degree in Industrial Engineering, we were often told about W. Edwards Deming and his quote, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Since that time, I’ve also seen it credited to Peter Drucker and a number of other management gurus. Even though it is a drastic oversimplification of some very complex ideas about what can and should be measured and managed and what should not, there is a lot of truth in that simple statement.
However, trying to implement this simplified statement often causes Analysis Paralysis (where you do nothing because there is too much data to analyse) or a Feedback Control Overload (where you are changing things too quickly in response to system feedback, making the system unstable).
The way to beat these problems is not to collect less data, but rather to collect everything you can, and then use a disciplined method of analysis to create actionable information. If your structured analysis turns up something unusual, you always have the raw data to go back to, but you can’t be looking at every bit-and-byte all time.
The attached infographic from MojoMediaLabs came to me by way of the MarketingTechBlog. It gives a great example of a method for structured analysis of marketing data.
The Key Metrics of Analytics for Inbound Marketing by Douglas Karr on Marketing Technology
Source: The Key Metrics of Analytics for Inbound Marketing | Marketing Technology
