Ignoring Analytics: Arrogance, Ignorance, or Fear?
Do you embrace analytics? If you're not making decisions based on data, is it out of arrogance, ignorance, or fear?
By on Mar 26, 2009Do you embrace analytics? If you're not making decisions based on data, is it out of arrogance, ignorance, or fear?
There was a great article from Bryan Eisenberg at ClickZ recently titled "Building Optimization Into Your Business Culture." (See http://www.clickz.com/3632933 for the full text)
The article discusses how companies often fail to make optimization a part of their marketing operations, especially when it comes to Web sites.
Unfortunately, I have found this often to be true in pharma digital marketing in general. Clients have us gather the data, ask us to slice it and dice it a million different ways, and some might read the reports. But the pharma marketers who truly apply the data to drive decisions are a rare breed indeed. (Apologies to those of you who are analytics evangelists - do you by chance need a new digital marketing agency that loves analytics as much as you do?! Call me!)
Anyway ... why do some people choose to ignore analytics?
The author of the ClickZ article suggests that marketers who don't care about analytics suffer from either ignorance or arrogance ... ignorance because they don't know what to do with the data, or arrogance because they think they are smart enough to trust their gut without the numbers backing them up.
I would add to that they might also suffer from a certain level of fear. Fear of their programs not working, and fear that all that effort spent was a big waste of time and money. And that is probably a completely natural survival instinct. Perhaps also it is a function of time and energy ... analytics is just one more thing to look at, deal with, and think about in the fast-paced pharma marketing world.
The smartest marketers I have observed are those that are not afraid of the data, and they're not afraid of failure. They set aside any arrogance and if they're not comfortable with numbers, they say so. They let the experts interpret the data and provide true analysis and insights. They recognize that often marketing is an experiment - try something, optimize it, try again. (And by the way, if your agency isn't forthcoming with data/analytics, there might be a reason. Ask questions. Lots of them.)
At Intouch, we watch site data like a hawk. We keep our eyes on banner and search campaigns constantly. If something is off-kilter, we adjust, re-deploy, and measure again.
And, most importantly, we incorporate prescription-level data into our analytics and measurement whenever possible to ensure our campaigns are effective.
One of my earliest blog posts discussed the difficulty in measuring ROI in pharma due to the black hole between marketing activity and patients filling prescriptions. Yes, it's hard. But at the end of the day, if your marketing activities - no matter what the channel - aren't tying back to prescriptions somewhere, how do you know they are effective? (This is now possible in the U.S. using de-identified data, though I am not familiar with ex-U.S. availability of this type of data).
As soon as marketers embrace analytics, the sooner the value of digital marketing will fully be recognized at all levels of pharma organizations.
Marketers, embrace analytics! Optimize your programs, optimize the approach. And let the data drive decisions.