The Importance of Data Visualisation

Here at Whiteark, we love data, it’s at the centre of everything we do, it gives us that facts, and in order to interpret what the data is telling us, and communicating our findings with key stakeholders, data visualisation plays a fundamental role.

What is Data Visualization?

In today’s business environment, and the rise of big data upon us, we need to be able to interpret increasingly larger batches of data. Data visualization takes the raw data, models it, and delivers the data so that conclusions can be reached - it provides visual context of what the data/information means through the use of maps, graphs, tables, infographics or other visual formats. This makes data more natural for the human mind to comprehend and makes it easier to identify trends, patterns, and outliers within large data sets.

Users of Data Visualisation

Data visualisation is used across all industries to improve top line and bottom-line growth across all aspects of the organisation. As a crucial step in data analytics, data visualisation enables companies to unleash the power of their data by highlighting critical insights and messages that would otherwise be lost.

Benefits of Data Visualisation

The key benefit of data visualisation is the positive affect it has on a company’s decision making process – it enables businesses to recognise patterns more easily and faster. Below are some specific ways that companies can benefit from data visualisations:

Understanding Trends:

Analysing current and historical data allows companies to understand trends over a period - where they were and predict where they can potentially go. Applying data visualisation to this type of application is one of the most valuable.

Identifying Frequency:

Frequency is related to Trends Over Time but refers to the rate of particular instances/occurrences – i.e., understanding the frequency of customer purchases and at which point in the customer journey they make their purchase supports companies with predicting/planning different marketing and acquisition strategies for potential new customers.

Recognising Relationships:

Data visualisation simplifies identifying the correlations between the relationship of independent variables – this allows companies to make more informed/better business decisions.

Examining the Market:

Data visualization takes the information from different markets to give you insights into which audiences to focus your attention on and which ones to avoid. We get a clearer picture of the opportunities within those markets by displaying this data in visual representation.

Performance:

The ability to obtain real time information with data displayed clearly on a functional dashboard allows companies to act and respond swiftly. It helps leaders identify challenges/ areas for improvement and provokes decisions to pivot more quickly.

Assessing Risk and Reward:

Analysing value and risk metrics requires expertise because, without data visualization, we must interpret complicated spreadsheets and numbers. Once information is visualized, we can then pinpoint areas that may or may not require action.

Data Visualisation Techniques

There are a range of methods that can be used to distil data/information in a way that can be visualised. It’s important to understand the type of data being modelled and what its intended purpose is, before determining the most appropriate visual representation. Some visualisations are manually created, while others are automated. Below are some examples:

Infographics: infographics take an extensive collection of information and give you a comprehensive depiction. An infographic is excellent for exploring complex and highly subjective topics.

Heatmap: This is a graph with numerical data points highlighted in light, warm and dark colours to indicate whether the data is high-value or low-value.

Area chart: This chart is great for visualising the data’s time-series relationship.

Histogram: Histograms are used for measuring frequencies. These graphs show the distribution of numerical data using an automated data visualisation formula to display a range of values that can be easily interpreted.

Overall, data visualisation is important tool in today’s environment as it summarises a plethora of information in a way that makes it easier to identify patterns and trends, rather than looking through thousands of rows on a spreadsheet. The purpose of data analysis is to gain insights, and data is much more valuable when it is visualised as it simplifies communicating the findings to a broad range of audience groups.

Resetting your Go-To-Market Strategy during this Pandemic

There isn’t a business in the world, big or small that hasn’t been impacted by the COVID pandemic.

For some the impacts will have been catastrophic, for others they actually have been positive, but for all of us there has been a change and there will continue to be changes both good and bad that we must confront.

The reality is that regardless of where your business finds itself right at this moment, good or bad, you can’t just sit idle, you need to respond to the voice of your customers and to the messages the market is sending you.

The measures businesses on both sides of the impact equation have taken to protect staff, ensuring they are safely working from home, standing up processes that allow this to happen whilst continuing to serve customers, and most importantly ensuring that their mental wellbeing is front of mind has been critical in giving businesses the chance to reset.

Unfortunately, this reset in its own right won’t be enough to ensure that businesses survive or continue to thrive beyond this pandemic.  In order to achieve this your businesses will need to redefine it’s go-to-market strategy to (a) match the market conditions and opportunities right now and (b) to predict what market conditions might look like on the other side.

Here are some thoughts on where you might start and some of the activities that might help you pivot accordingly:

Stay close to your customers

In times of crisis we naturally retreat and seek to protect our own, our staff, our revenues which is natural. Our customers are being impacted as much as we ae and we must continue to engage them to understand what their situation is, not with a view to selling them but with a view to being genuinely customer centric and showing that value is real. Having this frame of reference will help you to continue to engage with your customers through this pandemic with the trust you’ve built over time, empathy and most importantly on their terms. Engaging customers now will only enhance your customer experience, focus on this as a personal activity, not  as a commercial one.

Be clear on the value you deliver to your customers

Now is not the time to sell aggressively, it’s the right time however to reaffirm the reason and purpose for why your company/product exists. Have your sales and marketing team remind you of this narrative, why your company and/or product exists? Remember you exist because there is a problem or a pain point that you are serving in the market that your customers can’t do without. In this current environment your goal is to be so closely connected to your customers that you understand their pain as it stands in this pandemic and more importantly how you and your team can help them solve them. Now more than ever, your customers are looking to be more than just buyers, they want to partner with people who are partners. There is no better time than now to re-assess your sales and GTM process and establish new targets and goals that are helping address the gaps to your customers problems.

Engage your local community

This pandemic has made life hard for every community, they are all suffering from the lack of connection with family, friends and the even the businesses they love. This is the time to support those businesses who are supporting their communities to get through this, do this because you care about these communities not because you are seeking better sales results or higher profits. This is an opportunity for us to be leaders in our actions, to show goodwill, compassion, lend support to our customers without expecting anything in return. Yours customers will become even greater beacons for your brand and or your product and they will become the community champions for you.

It’s clear that there is no definitive timeframe for how long this pandemic will go on, however it is imperative that you can’t just sit in hope.

Adapting your go-to-market strategy to the reality of this pandemic situation is an action that with deliver returns both now and also for the other side.

We are living with the reality in Australia that each state is responding to this pandemic slightly differently and as a consequence we need to ensure that our response is reflective of these variables and the fact that our customers realities and emotions will all be different.

There’s no better time than right now for your business to check in on your go-to-market approach, reaffirm or perhaps even reshape it so as to help you maintain the advantage you have or reignite the values as to why you exist.

Here’s to a post pandemic reality for your business that shines brighter than the reality of yesterday and today.

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Looking to build your own Go To Market strategy?

Let us help. To learn more about how to build a go-to-market strategy for your customers, contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

This pandemic has changed the way we serve our customers for ever; or has it?

Is that the sound of the end of the night out at the movies? Will any of us ever dare dream of heading to the gym again? Listening to the doom and gloom in this unprecedented time would have us believe that we are witnessing the end of any type of physical engagement with products or services?

The question is that whilst at this moment, customer experience might be suspended do you care enough to start transforming your customers now so that you don’t disconnect in this period of hiatus?

Sometime in recent years it became the height of modernity to have strangers sleep in your bed when you weren’t there or to sit next to you as you drove from one city to another. It felt futuristic to mention that the gym you went to was because you had a membership that allowed you to go anywhere, anytime. It was cool to catch a movie with your partner, order the meal online and be wined and dined in-front of the big screen. This movement was called the sharing economy and it relied upon certain widely held assumptions, such as that it is fine to be near other people and that it is alright to touch what they have touched what they touched, it was also enabled by clever technology and customer experience strategies.

In this age of pandemic anxiety, these assumptions have all but evaporated. The sharing, or peer-to-peer, economy was meant to represent the commerce of the future, the perfect fusion of technology and reality. That destiny now looks shaky at best. What will happen to Fitness First, to the Gold class movie experience, dating apps? What will become of the start-ups enabling us to monetise our health, our travel, our spare time? And, beyond the brands themselves, what will happen to the people who were making some or all of their income from these platforms?

Is life as we know it, over?

Given we have moved beyond bunkering in to wondering what we should do to safeguard tomorrow?

The immediate future for most businesses will surely involve some kind of grey area between house arrest and a version of pre-pandemic freedom. Lockdowns and physical distancing will be escalated and de-escalated by the government like the gears in a car.

Some businesses might suffer greatly in full lockdown but then thrive when movement is even slightly freer if they chose to face into their reality now and see this as an opportunity to improve or transform to tomorrow. I believe that when we open up, demand will be robust because people will be overjoyed to be liberated and if they can afford it, will indulge.

Most expect there to be a post-pandemic behavioural shift. We can expect for example that there will be a new normal around physical distancing. Employees I’m certain will be eager to return to work, but there will need to be a rethink of the workplace and of engagement to incorporate working from home and working from the office.

We will most certainly go back to the gym, maybe even venture out to dinner or to the movies but that too will be different, it will be defined by a new normal one that business must create and start engaging their customers on today. It will be defined by those who have a clear strategy for speaking to their customers now, sharing with them their thoughts and listening to the hopes and dreams of those they serve.

In order to assess the future of your business, it’s worth reflecting on the customers you serve and what might change for them?

The truth is that the future is likely to change in terms of the way we engage, our customers priorities might shift or their needs may be slightly different?

Make no mistake, the value shift towards an even more customer centric and   social consciousness will only continue – and part of that is a big vote for the value your organisation places on the customer versus your own needs. The idea that this is the way we’ve done and it’s the way we’ll always do it was radically shifted forever when we pivoted to the sharing economy. Who would have ever dreamed that I could book my car as I was having my coffee and not worry about trying to hail a cab? By providing customers with communications and strategies on how your organisation intends to serve their needs post this pandemic is something you should be working on now.

It’s always been about the customer right, that’s what we all tell ourselves and now that in some industries we are in a position that we can’t serve them we’ve stopped leveraging the time we have to continue talking to them, or have we?

Whatever happens with this pandemic, however long it takes to get to a better place, the sheer force of the technologies that are available to everyone will ensure that those who have a clear line of sight of their customers will most definitely be ready to go again.

It’s conceivable that the new world order may be different, however be clear that most of the underlying principles around customer experience will remain the same.

If nothing else, make this the moment that belongs to someone else, the customers you serve?

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Looking to build your own Go To Market strategy?

Let us help. To learn more about how to build a go-to-market strategy for your customers, contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au