Q2 • 2021


07


“Data is the vote and voice of the consumer” and data must drive content creation and marketing efforts.


But cheer up, content creators. That means


the data you consume should be helping you spend your creative and writing time more efficiently and helping make the work you produce more effective. Before taking his current position as the


Director of Marketing and Communications for University College at Washington University in St. Louis, Hinderliter spent over fifteen years in data-driven marketing jobs. It was an experience earlier in his career, when he was working as a marketing coordinator in the casino industry, that opened his eyes to the idea that “data is the vote and voice of the consumer” and data must drive content creation and marketing efforts. But first, he says, marketers need to come to grips with the idea that a paradigm shift toward data has occurred in the marketing world. As new platforms have emerged in the era of the internet, the dominance has moved to data as it plays a larger role in both marketing and the consumer experience. He points out that “the three most dominant platforms in search (Google), social (Facebook), and e-commerce (Amazon) achieved their lofty status by finding


One of Hinderliter’s main points in the book is that only data can determine the who, what, where, when, and why for content.


value in the data versus the content.” All of these major platforms use data exclusively to personalize the user experience. “Algorithms are now creating unique search results, social news feeds, and e-commerce offerings where content is just another data point for them,” Hinderliter says. So, if you are that creative type who abhors data, should you be readying yourself to become intimately acquainted with Excel files, counting clicks on social media, or scrolling through surveys to better understand your audience? Hinderliter says it will be all of the above, and with the amount of data collected now growing faster than the internet itself, sifting through that data to find what is useful is a daunting thought. “Quantitative and qualitative measurements


are critical to understanding audience preferences, and that will come from a variety of sources and methods,” he says. “But the most crucial part is knowing what data to measure.” And for many, the problem isn’t whether or not you have data; you probably have more than you know what to do with. More often than not, the problem is knowing which data is important and how to use the data to improve the way you engage with your consumers. To help marketers, Hinderliter presents what he calls his VOTE data framework model, which allows marketers to take into consideration whether the data they are collecting is valuable, organizable, targetable, and explainable. VALUABLE data is anything meaningful


and relevant to an organization’s goals. Data in this category is most significant when it can be connected between the consumer and the product or service. ORGANIZABLE data has the most criteria in the model, as it is data that can be collected, stored, sorted, and repeated. TARGETABLE data should be data points


used for directly aiming at or indirectly knowing that for which consumers aim. The intent is to remove any doubts for marketers about what data is needed or required by this model. EXPLAINABLE data must be understood by


stakeholders both inside and outside of marketing. In every organizational hierarchy, marketing is accountable to others higher up in leadership, and those higher-ups need to understand why the data is useful to marketing. “The VOTE data framework model is designed to be universal and flexible enough for any size [of] organization and can be designed to be unique to each user. It’s not just about what you include but also what you exclude,” says Hinderliter. A relevant example he shares is his own experience in higher-education marketing and taking a data-driven approach to campus tours. “We started by looking at the enrollment


process and anywhere a student could discover an aha moment of their own throughout that process. We found a significant connection with campus tours. It ranked sixth as a valuable experience


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