This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.

Marketers Guide to Data Visualization

Chirag Shivalker 5 Stories

Monday September 17, 2018,

4 min Read

Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text. This means comprehending texts is slower and we need more time to make sense of data presented in form of dispersed numbers. Instead data visualization makes it easy & helps us to extract simple patterns from complex data. Marketing departments of leading companies, marketers and marketing firms encounter a lot of data and hence, this article is an effort to show how data visualization guides marketers for a smooth sail in market.

1. Quick visual adaptation

Analytic tools can help you to process complex data to understand them, leading you to get into optimal decisions. But data visualization reduces the load of spotting the hidden patterns from massive data that you encounter and process every day. Let’s take a simple example of a sales report to look at the past for insight into the future.

Image Credit: Quora

Data visualization of monthly sales report shows spikes and dips over time. Marketers and sales teams can use this information to quickly identify customers’ buying and spending patterns. If sales consistently drop in the second quarter, for instance, deciding to increase special offers around that time becomes easier. On the other hand, if you see a regular increase in sales in the first quarter of each year, you can use that data strategically to set new aim for your team and encourage them to drive sales even higher.

Here data visualization will portray the ‘sales achieved’ and ‘sales lost’ in each quarter which is easy to grasp from those uncountable numbers showing some different story. In this way companies can strategize for upcoming quarter and convert it to ‘sales achieved’ if it was a ‘sales lost’ in last quarter.

2. Pump up SEO pages

While optimizing an internal website, marketers realize that visibility of links is imbalanced. There are some pages which are highly visible but some are not at all visible or lag behind without any reason. Visualizing factors affecting page visibility like different page authority, inbound links attached to it and rankings is done to conclude that the problem was imbalance link distribution among different pages. There were pages that had 10 links attached to it and some had just 2 so this imbalance created a clash. Data visualization can helps to rate these links on a score of 1-10 based on the ranking or visibility of link to clearly see the links with lowest visibility. Your website will see a growing change and your domain authority will organically increase over time.

3. Accurate customer targeting

If you look at CRM - Customer Relationship Management data you will be perplexed to gauge how to analyze and work on this type of data as they already look complex. Visualization can be a saving grace here. Rather than integrating rows and columns with complex formulas and functions, it would be much easier to instantly review picture made out of those complex data sets in seconds, instead of days.

From the example sales and marketing teams can visualize and uncover new trends in buyer behavior and target right customers:

According to Quarterly ‘sales achieved’ and ‘sales lost’ can help in strategizing
Personalized marketing based on sales achieved from targeted customers
Analyze which employee worked for which leads
Vary marketing strategies according to location and sales achieved
Identify the key touch points in your customer’s journey

4. Data driven marketing

Today information is transmitted as quickly as a wink; and it is not easy for customer to figure out which information is right and which is wrong. Storytelling using data can help you fill gaps and understand company’s insights. Rather than processing data and asking users to visualize main ideas, companies can use data visualization to actually communicate key information rapidly.

Final Word

Visual contents are constantly garnering customer’s attention and interaction. You see social media is more than 70% of just visuals. Data is undoubtedly the primary driving force but linking data to appealing visuals marketers can now understand complicated data and turn them to simple ones. With help of data visualization marketers can create newer methods of distilling value from scattered rows of spreadsheets to attractive visuals.