We're in an age of online excess. There are more than 500,000 apps in the Apple app store, and the web is exploding with sites and services. Consumers are being bombarded with choices, and marketers have been inundated with data. If you're looking to successfully launch a product in this strange new world, you need a way to see and cut through the noise. To survive, you need data science.
Data science can play a critical role in helping marketing decision makers know how to spend their money online. In this new world, it's all about measuring the efficacy of your social dollars, moving beyond listening platforms and understanding the early consumer signals that predict whether or not you are making the right moves. The right intelligence will help you avoid misfires and pull in more of the people who are most likely to monetize, so you get the most bang for your marketing buck.
Make your data actionable
From games to casinos to healthcare to Wall Street, data science is transforming every industry, offering businesses a whole new level of insight and an efficient way to optimize the customer experience. But what many organizations fail to understand is that simply being able to collect huge quantities of data doesn't make that data useful. If the big data doesn't lead to meaningful, actionable insights, then it's a big waste of time.
Data science translates all those stats and figures into meaningful signals. It's a rigorous, complex process that, when done by experts, gives your company the ability to make smarter decisions -- faster than the competition. Data scientists have the know-how to take the analysis and build it into a dashboard or easy-to-use system that any person or team in an organization can access and use to make clean, clear data-driven decisions on a daily or even real-time basis. But unlocking the data is only step one.
Know which metrics matter
The second step is determining which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) matter most to your specific business depending on what stage you're in. For instance, in the game world, there are early indicators that are predictive of revenue. In the old days, a company would just look at basics like cost of acquisition and revenue as a result of the folks they bring in who use their service. But now, in the age of data science, we also measure things like one day, seven day, and 30 day retention rates, and which marketing channels are generating the customers with the highest propensity to stick around and become valuable customers. In the launch stage, focusing on the right KPIs can be a game-changer.
Another important metric to look at early is "virality." We call it the "K factor." The higher your K factor, the greater the likelihood that users will bring in their friends through viral channels like Facebook streams, posts, and invitations. If you can focus on marketing channels that generate the most influential people to build an organic following, your cost of acquisition will decrease in the long term.
It's not easy to look at a dashboard and understand things like this. You need the guidance and expertise that data scientists provide.
