With an overwhelming amount of knowledge marketers can pull from customer interaction at every moment of the buying cycle, behavioral information could very well influence the future of a brand’s marketing, products, and overall operations. SetUp spoke with industry experts, including Blake Williams, Director of Data Strategy at The Shipyard, about their thoughts on leveraging data and using tools to extract data to inform strategy.

Williams emphasizes the importance of tracking every action to learn more about the audience. “To successfully integrate data into strategy, it is critical to have a strong foundation for data collection. At The Shipyard, we extend our measurement philosophy well beyond just media KPIs, also identifying and tracking additional actions that would give us an opportunity to learn about our audience (both media and organic audiences). This allows for our data analysis to be as nimble as our strategic execution needs it to be.” 

He continued, “Additionally, we enter media campaigns with a clear Learning Agenda. While performance KPIs are the focal point of in-market media, we also enter the market with hypotheses about audience behavior, message performance, customer journeys and more. By structuring the data collection and the in-platform media set up to account for these hypotheses, we generate real answers to key questions.” These efforts inform next steps. The team uses results that show promise like positive first-touches or conversions to expand on in their campaigns.