Data validation

This depends entirely on your objectives and the hypotheses formed in earlier research. However, some key digital touchpoints include:

• Search data. This offers a closer look into what people are searching for, the questions they’re asking, and when and how they’re doing it, enabling you to uncover true user intent and identify pain points and unmet needs.

• Social listening. Monitoring demographic and conversational data helps you understand the broader sentiment surrounding your brand. By listening to customer feedback on social media, you can better understand key pain points, desires, and emerging trends throughout the customer journey to directly inform your own strategy. 

• Web analytics. This provides a comprehensive overview of how users interact with your site – from what they’ve clicked on and where they’re dropping off, to how many conversions are coming through – and is crucial for optimising the user journey.

• Heuristic evaluation. We assess how effective your digital customer touchpoints are against a set of key usability principles. From navigation ease to user control and error prevention, this analyses how intuitive and user-friendly your owned properties are compared with your competitors, so you can make adjustments to boost engagement.

We use a range of tools and techniques to gather, clean, analyse, and visualise audience data, depending on the channel we’re exploring. For social listening, for example, we might use PR tools such as Meltwater to analyse the volume and sentiment of your brand’s share of voice. Meanwhile, for website analytics, we’d leverage the likes of Google Analytics and Hotjar to explore website traffic and user behaviour. Every approach is bespoke to your needs.

Data validation helps to accurately measure customer behaviours and understand the impact of their moments of truth. With this insight, we can formulate targeted improvements accordingly – improving targeting (and therefore conversions), mitigating risks, and optimising resources.

There’s a careful balance between not enough and way too much. If you overlook your marketing data, you could end up wasting resources on ineffective strategies that drain budgets and damage engagement. But scrutinise too often, and you risk making knee-jerk decisions on anomalous results. It’s important to continuously monitor data to build a picture of what ‘normal’ looks like for you and your market, with incremental reviews in place to adjust the broader strategy. Whether that’s monthly, quarterly, or bi-annually, it needs to work for you.