#17 Two Cents on: Truth
In this series, I will write about my two cents on deep topics. This episode is about Truth.
They will not be academic research or philosophical discussions. They are about how I personally experience these things in my life. The powerful quotes that have inspired me. I hope they will inspire you in some way as well.
Two quotes about truth that keep coming back to my mind:
Three things cannot be long hidden: The sun, the moon, and the truth. — Buddha
and
Truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. — Gloria Steinem
Below you will find how these two quotes are relatable to my work and life.
Context:
I am a data scientist in B2B digital marketing.
(If it’s unclear what that means. Here: Digital marketing means that the marketing materials we produce and put out there are on the internet and, more importantly, have lots of data to analyze. B2B means that our customers are enterprises. The customer journey (i.e. everything that a customer did before they bought our product) is long (in time and/or number of touches) and complicated (number of people involved). Data scientist means that I write programming code to clean up, analyze, and make sense of large amounts of data.)
Recently I have been involved in a project, trying to find out “What journey do our customers take (i.e. what marketing contents they engage with) before they hit the blue button* in our website.” — * to simplify the story, assuming it means they are ready to talk to a sales rep about a potential purchase.
This project excites me! It feels like turning to the last page to find out the answer to a puzzle after I have worked on it forever. It feels like I can finally see how, or which part of my work has mattered to drive my company’s business.
How am I doing? Does it matter? These are the deep, fundamental question that people consciously or unconsciously think about, ALL THE TIME.
The end of Context.
Then, the Truth pissed me off.
The “Truth”: I found that vast majority* of customers who hit blue button, don’t have any other marketing interactions with us before. (*Note: the exact number is masked for privacy reasons.)
This “Truth” is telling me one or more of the following.
The Piss-Me-Off part:
- We don’t capture data very well. Lots of data before the customers hit Contact Me is not captured in database.
- Customers don’t want us to know them and capture their data. They didn’t fill out forms; they didn’t want us to send them marketing emails (that’s why we don’t “know them”). They want to contact us when they are ready.
- Our marketing efforts don’t really matter. Customers explore on their own term, such as Googling, watch videos on YouTube, asking their peers, colleagues and friends.
The Set-Me-Free part:
- I thought twice about this situation. It doesn’t really pass common sense check. It is like: Yesterday we were strangers. Today boom we are engaged! They must have done something. We just don’t know.
- If customers don’t want to tell us who they are. They don’t want us to contact them. Then…
- Does knowing really matter? Do we really need to know everything? What about we go share truly valuable things (articles, webinars about industry insights and tech trends; free trials and helpful demos) with potential customers; make sure they know how to contact us; and let them do that when they are ready.
Final thoughts:
If this marketing is for my own moms-and-pop shop business, yes the mindset above might work.
However, working in big organizations add complexity. We still need to justify the investment we throw into marketing. Then I fall into this endless loop:
For now, I think a middle ground to end this blog with is: We might not have a definite answer to “Do we matter” yet. We might never have a definite answer. But what we can have, is progress. We can look back and see how much more (or less) we are contributing to the company’s business now than last year, three years ago, five years ago.
We might not ever know the true north. But knowing the north is better than nothing at all.
Last quote that will make you feel better if you are also in some kind of endless loops:
The truth is that stress doesn’t come from your boss, your kids, your spouse, traffic jams, health challenges, or other circumstances. It comes from your thoughts about these circumstances. — Andrew J. Bernstein
Thank you for reading!