Data needs to tell a story, be it to a prospective customer, an internal marketing decision maker or to a board member. But maximising impact and minimising waste requires a mindset shift away from micro-KPIs and one-off examples to macro impacts against bigger objectives.

Average numbers can hide many sins. An average of 200 downloads per piece of content could sound great until you realise that can be generated by four assets with 25 downloads and one with 900. People like averages when it allows them to tell a simple story in one number. They’re concise and, particularly when the number is good, memorable. But its always worth recognising that an average is not the same as a reality.

Many marketing organisations are full of opinions and experience but find data and statistical analysis in short supply. What actually drives marketing value? And how much does that value cost? The role of a marketing leader is to invest resources to create value (i.e. buy impact). Budgets can only be spent once. Cut out the low value and see what happens. Reinvest in the high-value. Follow the data, not the way things have always been done.

Underlying trends can be conveniently easy to ignore when it is advantageous and usefully notable when they solve a problem. The only way to understand if activity is actually driving action is to abstract trends from impact. Of course, this requires an understanding of the trends themselves, which can be difficult when you don’t recognise that a trend exists.

To drive continual improvement at the macro level, to understand if you are actually creating inception at scale as you intend and to build a customer journey that reliably and repeatedly advances customers on their purchase lifecycle you need to have access to consistent data. Only when value and performance are measured consistently over time against a benchmark of cost or some other factor can understanding of relative improvement be established. Spending more to get more is not improving performance.