There is an old axiom from the discipline of social science that applies to marketing data as well:

Data cannot tell us what to do.  But it can tell us the results of what we’re doing. 

The implications of this statement are far reaching when you consider your overall small business marketing strategy.

It’s easy today to fall in love with data.  Who saw this?  Who clicked?  How long did they stay?  What actions did they take?  What’s the new trend?  What’s making money? 

However, you can run into problems when you start to expect the data to actually tell you what to do.

Social sciences experienced this when the powers at be wanted to spend more money on education to improve results, only to find that the data showed the best predictor of a school’s outcomes was the quality of the child’s family life and parental support.

In overall planning, where you’re making long-term commitments, creating innovations, and even challenging the status-quo, using data as an upfront guide is a erroneous.  You can’t develop a business concept just on data.  You can’t use a map to guide you through un-mapped territory.

In marketing, data really does two things.  It tells you what’s not working so you can stop doing it.  And it tells what is working so you can do more of it.

But it won’t tell you what works before it’s been tried.  And that, oddly, is a limitation many people have trouble accepting.  They want the answer to precede the question so they don’t have to risk being wrong.

But there is no innovation without risk.  There is no learning without mistakes.  Marketing and business ventures don’t come with numerical guarantees.

Fairly often at Marketing 360®, we get new leads who ask us if we can guarantee results. Can you guarantee I’ll be on page one of search?  Do you have a guarantee I’ll get a return on my investment?  

This question exposes the data fallacy.  They expect us to have foolproof data that will show the way to their success.

It doesn’t work that way, and hopefully it never will.  The day data starts to tell us what to do is the day The Matrix becomes a reality.

In fact, those that use data to “guarantee” future results are card counters.  They cheat the system by artificially altering results (black hat SEO, for example).

Data is essential to business success because it proves what works and what doesn’t.  But it’s a lazy, short-term obsessed way to figure out what to do next.

You need human creativity and imagination to do that.  And thankfully (at least for now), the data shows it will stay that way.