By Kumar Rachuri, Director of State and Local Government Solutions
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” – Peter Drucker
Today’s marketing geniuses ensure their most important decisions are guided by data.
The numbers give you the power to understand what your audience is interested in—what they’re clicking on and what they’re skipping—as well as what displays work. With tools to understand what engages them the most, you can create the tailored online experience that delights them, helps them, and keeps them coming back.
Data is important and powerful to government agencies in particular because it gives deeper insights into what the various and diverse number of citizens are concerned with. Data can show whether more people are coming to an agency to seek help with filing taxes, setting up businesses, or asking questions regarding public health or construction.
With those insights, an agency can decide how to best display information to help the people they are serving. It’s a key step and an effective tool to making the information on your website more tailored and personalized.
If citizens don’t understand something or can’t find what they need online, they will likely want to call the agency and speak to a human. But staffing an agency or call center with actual people is cumbersome and expensive.
Better data helps solve this problem even before it occurs. By understanding audience needs before they arise, you provide targeted customer service to your customers. That’s the power of data. That’s why the numbers should inform all of your decisions, not just in the marketing department.
This can be a big mental shift for some agencies that are not yet used to the power of data. But getting an entire agency up to speed on the insights the numbers provide will save time, money and effort in the long run.
In order to foster a culture where data is at the heart of every decision, an agency ought to provide access for your entire staff to the analytics platform you use. That way, everyone is empowered to gather his or her own insights and theories.
Analytics platforms that help you do this have evolved greatly in the past few years. The best analytics platforms today don’t just show a graph with a spreadsheet of numbers. They also guide you toward insights and actions gathered from the smart algorithms.
Remember, data is there to help you make targeted business decisions. They’re useless just on their own. Without the analysis and insight drawn from them, they’re just meaningless numbers. With today’s new technology, you can ask more useful questions that inform your next action. How does that result impact your user experience? What does that say about your page?
The worst habit is to collect data and never check it. Leverage the insights that you are sitting on—they are itching for action. Instead of simply showing the number of clicks, shares, or likes on a page, share theories to test and execute based upon the conclusions you draw from that data.
