YODA: Your Own DAta
Your Own DAta (YODA) is market data collected firsthand by your own team to validate your thesis.
When we have an idea for a startup or in an organisation looking at a new growth opportunity we go looking for data to validate our thesis in the public domain: a research by a reputed consultancy, an insightful infographic from a leading newspaper, a scholarly hypothesis based on interviews by reputed professors for their book. These data points that we gather shape our broad strategic direction: which product to sell, which segment to target, which geography to apportion more of our budgets to.
The problem with Other People’s Data
The important fact to keep in mind is that everyone has their own motive. A world renowned consultancy writes about the changes wrought by the pandemic and highlights how work-from-home has IT challenges that needs a five point action plan. The consultant is writing thought leadership papers for one reason, to get projects.
A newspaper writes a piece based on a research with ‘30 top CEOs’ which concludes that ‘majority of CEOs think we are social animals, and we will be back in offices as soon as we can’. If you delve enough, most of us don’t, you may find the research has been commissioned by a large commercial property player who also coincidentally has taken a full page ad in the newspaper launching a swanky new office building.
Even with the cleanest motives, a professor writing a piece with a theory in his head tends to pick (almost subconsciously, we do it too) the most convincing data and ignores the red flags as outliers.
A live example
When we were dreaming up the idea of Your Marketing List we decided to focus on
1. Digital marketing
2. Startups and small/medium businesses (SMBs).
Why?
The thesis was the audience
- Had a heightened need (accelerated by the pandemic) to use digital marketing to drive growth
- They are experts in their own domain but they don’t have the expertise in digital marketing to know how to use it effectively.
We, on the other hand, had decades of experience in using marketing to drive growth.
What data did we need?
Digital marketing is a collection of a vast array of services. We needed to get an idea of the demand of the individual services. One, to be sure there is a market. Two, to decide what kind of freelancers we should first focus on getting on board. Where should we be looking? We knew reports, articles, agency forecasts were not granular enough and as already stated above not very reliable. At least, not to build our dream on.
We thought about how a startup that needs a content writer for their blog, would go about it. The obvious answer was they would ‘google’ it. So, we did the logical thing and did some keyword volume research. This is what we found for India for the period June 2020 -May 2021:
There seemed to be adequate demand and we got a prioritised list of services to focus on. We used this for our freelancer focus, as well as how we listed the services on the website.
What does our own data tell us?
We took the call not to spend any marketing dollars for the first few months, use our own personal social media presence to inform our networks about our offering and wait and see what happened. Remember, we were testing for
- Do startups and SMBs need digital marketing?
- Do they need help figuring out to how to use digital marketing?
Over a period of four months, we got 44 prospects (and you can read about that in detail here). And these are the services they were looking for:
If you compare this with what we got from the keyword research, it is close but has some very important differences. Logo design, which had the largest volume in our research was at seventh position with just three enquiries. Content writing had moved from near the bottom to second.
Your Own Data (YODA) has raised questions like this:
- Why is social media marketing top of the pops?
- The next three, Content/Web Dev/SEO are closely linked to each other. How does that inform our marketing?
- Why are enquiries for logo design so low?
We are forming new thesis based on our own data which we will test. We are planning to start search engine marketing (SEM) for Your Marketing List. Think about what we would have done if we didn’t have our data-possibly spent most of our micro budget targetting ‘logo design’. Based on our data we will probably start with social media marketing.
To wrap up, be skeptical about generic or global data. Everything looks nice and shiny. Do small tests and collect your own data (YODA). Even in small numbers, it will tell you more.
Data, they say, is the new oil.
Only if it is yours.
To read other articles on strategy and digital marketing, please refer to our blog posts.