Planning and making in-the-moment data-driven decisions are critical to the way modern business works. Customer trends, competitors, website ranking, social media engagement — it's a lot to keep up with. And hovering over individual reports in real-time often provides little big-picture insight. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Data visualization tools can pull key data points from many reports and present them in an easy-to-understand visual way for both internal and customer-facing content.
Data visualization is the use of charts, graphs, and other visual media to display many critical data points together in a way that shows the interconnections, outliers, and trends—giving meaning. It tells a story through data. The goal of data visualization is to make that information more quickly and completely understood, to gain insights, and clearly communicate with others.
Data visualization tools allow you to manually generate visual representations of data. You might use this kind of data visualization to create visual content for your audience. But many can also allow you to customize and automate the creation of visuals based on many data sources.
Both kinds of data visualization are becoming increasingly accessible to all business sizes.
Visuals allow you to make faster, more data-informed decisions—in real-time when needed. And making data visualization marketing part of your web growth-driven website design helps you more effectively engage and convert leads and close deals.
Companies have invested heavily in better data collection for many years. But analysts estimate that around 63% of that data goes unused. Some believe the rates are much higher. A 2020 McKinsey study found that as many as 40% of the reports companies run on a schedule never get looked at. We're collecting the data. But who has time to go through it all, or better yet, make sense of it?
Putting data into a useful form is just as important as collecting that data in the first place.
Summary: Society and business culture expect us to make logical, data-driven decisions. But we're trying to process more with the same brainpower. We have to be more efficient about it... or it's not humanly possible. Visuals are an efficient way for the human brain to process a lot of data.
This is true both internally and for your B2B customers who are just as overwhelmed by data as you are.
So, it's no wonder data visualization marketing is quickly becoming inseparable from decision-making in many organizations. This automated visual representation of information is integral to their ability to meet goals, understand customers, forecast trends, and make data-driven decisions.
Effective data visualization should quickly convey a message, supporting decision-making for you, your team, your C-suite, and your customers. So, different types of data visualization work well for certain kinds of data. Always be purposeful when choosing a type of data visualization.
Just take a look at these types of data visualizations and how companies use them to communicate both internally and with customers. And this isn't even an all-inclusive list.
Then you have the mother of data visualization, the Dashboard. This is a single-page view with multiple data visualizations that display performance across several KPIs. Just like one chart tells a story, the dashboard presents multiple visualizations to show how those stories create a big picture.
It allows you to track, understand, and as needed, respond to information without having to bounce around between screens, wasting time. A dashboard is essential to data-driven decision-making. To get the most out of a dashboard, don't leave it on default. Customize dashboards based on business goals.
Data visualization helps your business get the most out of data and keep up with the top trends shaping the future of marketing. Among these trends, is the need to create higher-quality content. Data visualization tools can help you create more impactful, shareable content. Blog posts with an image every 100 words get 2X the social media shares and social media posts with images get 2.3X the shares.
Of course, you could use a generic image. But why? Data visualization has added benefits you'll want to tap into, especially as a B2B marketer. It improves storytelling. Communicate your brand's Unique Value Proposition (UVP) visually to increase conversions, leads, and revenues. Make the content more engaging.
Studies show that visuals help people comprehend and retain more.
Create more dynamic blog posts, online events, white papers, case studies, and short-form videos with visual representations of first-party data.
In B2B, you're speaking a decision-maker's language when you visually represent your UVP. For example, in manufacturing, instead of telling decision-makers something, you can show them why they need your product or service in their terms, by visually representing its impact on:
You're dealing with a lot of complex information and multiple reports. Data visualization helps you bring it all together and portrays data in a purposeful manner. Share a lot of information people will retain without overloading the brain. This benefits everyone:
Showcase trends and patterns across the marketing platforms you've chosen: LinkedIn, Facebook, Email, Organic Search, Paid Search, etc.
Because you're seeing this information across platforms, you not only save a ton of time. This big-picture view can guide future marketing strategy, focus, and budget to get the highest ROI. Uncover hidden opportunities faster and avoid overspending on platforms and campaigns that aren't working for you.
Create a single-page view dashboard that gives you a broad overview across platforms:
Take this a step further with closed-loop data visualization. This marketing-sales alignment strategy pulls data from the respective teams' reports onto the marketing manager's dashboard to show which channels are generating not just leads, but revenues. Not just Marketing ROI (MROI), but closed-loop insights—all by platform:
Chances are, you're already looking at these KPIs. But how regularly? If you haven't invested in data visualization marketing, it's hard, if not impossible, to consistently keep track of all of this. Many struggle to even look at this monthly. As a result, you and other leaders don't have the information they need when they need it to make the most data-informed decisions.
Data visualization allows you to understand more data faster, but also stay tightly focused on the information that matters most to your marketing strategy and business. It allows for a more purposeful display of data.
Stand out among your competitors with a more dynamic website. Break up blocks of text with highly relevant visuals based on first-party data you've collected through your data visualization tools. Supplement 1P data by manually creating charts based on 3P data from reliable online sources to demonstrate UVP.
Create interest and display impactful information at just the right time to generate design-driven conversions.
Pro Tip: Develop a branded style for displaying visuals on your website. Outline this in your brand's style guide. Elements like colors, illustration style, font, and chart positioning can and should all be branded. Now, you're not only conveying data. You're communicating a consistent brand image.
Data visualization marketing tools improve how you understand the customer's journey with your brand. Improve customer experience and also the business results you generate from improving that experience.
For example, funnel charts are especially effective for visualizing website conversions. Bring the buyers' journey to life for your team. See your conversion rate at each stage, the volume of leads, and where people are getting stuck.
This provides you with key insights you can use to increase conversions, such as:
Combine this with heat mapping to:
Data visualization tools range from manual to highly customizable and fully automated. Both can be useful by marketers to enhance business results. So, let's look at some of the top tools.
Most of the data found on Google Analytics is summarized visually. And you can create customized reports, sales funnels, and dashboards to combine related data points and make this information even more useful to you.
Consider your website KPIs and customize your GA to show visual representations of important audience insights. Use this to improve website experience, engagement, and conversion.
Is your content engaging? Data visualizations can help you understand that.
But a word of caution. More engagement isn't always a good thing. If many visitors are viewing many pages without converting, it could indicate you're:
Fix the issue to improve the quantity and quality of leads. That's why it's important to use data visualization marketing to see the big picture.
Similar visual tools help you understand how your website traffic is changing over time in quantity, quality, and source to:
It is manual, so you have a greater time investment. But it can be an inexpensive way for marketers who don't yet have access to more advanced data visualization tools to start data visualization marketing. Create more visual and dynamic content and start realizing the customer-focused benefits we've discussed.
Use Excel to turn spreadsheet data into a chart. Then use a graphic design tool like Canva to create a branded visual for your content.
Here are some HubSpot visual reports LAIRE Digital has on its dashboards.
Data visualization marketing supports more effective strategies and campaigns on two fronts.
Behind the scenes, it allows you to more quickly and comprehensively understand data to make informed decisions. It improves marketing-sales alignment. Communicate complex ideas visually to your team and C-suite. Improve customer experience and delight customers.
On the customer-facing side, data visualization marketing helps you build a website that more clearly and quickly communicates your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) and brand image. It increases the shareability of content. It delivers the higher quality content that today's customers demand. And it sends the right visual message at the right time to earn that conversion.
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