Fortune 2000 companies wield big data to achieve marketing ROI that crushes competition. But in a David and Goliath story, Medium Data slays giants.
Here I aim to coin the term “Medium Data” and explain why it can achieve higher ROI than Big Data.
By now even the general population has a sense of what “Big Data” is, but most web marketing executives don’t see how far Big Data reduces the marketing cost of acquiring new and repeat customers. Artificial intelligence (AI) and its subspecies machine learning accelerate the speed of gathering and using not only mainstream data like credit card purchases and browsing history, but also far-flung and spotty data, like patterns of proximity to stores or timing of boarding a flight to Rome. Economies of scale in AI-driven marketing automation–including on-the-fly prioritization of web page content–increasingly propel top corporations’ ROI. But the sling and stone of Medium Data deployed by a canny David can at least drop Goliath to one knee.
The stone is data you already have or can acquire easily. The sling is new platforms like Google Big Query and Data Studio. David is the warrior who knows how to use this weapon. Look, there are diminishing marginal returns from the more difficult to acquire and disparate data. Applying advanced digital marketing knowledge to only the most important sets of data means less “I” (investment) than with Big Data, raising your ROI above Goliath’s.
An Example of Medium Data in Action
Imagine this: Using Medium Data, you discover three topics and 30 pages of your website that, given a relatively small amount of SEO work, will produce over double the ROI of any other marketing channel you used in the past. Before medium data, you could have discovered this opportunity by stitching together sources such as Google Analytics, Search Console, search engine rank, and keyword difficulty scores. That’s what good search marketing firms have done for years. But now, with Google’s revolutionary new tools in G Suite and with new APIs for importing diverse data, we can do better..
Now Medium Data–gathered via APIs into Google Sheets and a Big Query database, then analyzed in part by free AI, then rendered and clearly displayed by Data Studio–reveals your most cost-effective next steps within or among marketing channels, like SEO, PPC, CRO, or email marketing. The requisite data has long been available to you but it was too difficult and expensive to gather and analyze. Examples of this data are InLinks per page, conversion rate by types of click path through your site or by browser or by demographic attribute, average page load time, average profit per offering, and recent trends in competitors’ advertising spend. In Medium Data, expertise earns its place at your table by knowing what data to select and how to weigh and correlate it in order to reveal your next best move.
For years firms have offered software that uses Medium Data, but it starts at $3,000 a month and goes way up from there. Google has “disintermediated” many marketing models, like radio and newspaper advertising, and it’s happening again in the arena of such software.
Your Smartest Next Move
Obviously I want you to contact DISC to explore your options here. But with or without DISC, your next best move is to get David and his sling and stone on your side.
