In this episode of In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss what to do when you data sources off the beaten path. What if the data you have doesn’t answer the questions you have? Where do you go to get such data? Listen in as they explore Mastodon, cryptocurrencies, and so much more.

Listen to the audio here:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-unusualdatasources.mp3

Download the MP3 audio here.

Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know!

Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics!

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn

In this week’s in In-Ear Insights we are talking about alternate data sources for either highly regulated or completely unregulated industries. Recently we were doing some work just trying to figure out is cryptocurrency being used in a certain industry sector and found out through a whole bunch of digging that no because it’s extremely hard to get set up using crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum and Stella lumens and all these different currencies but brought up the discussion topic of how do you go about getting information in order to do predictive analytics to do planning strategy when the sources that your normal go tues don’t have the information? So Katie, you want to expand and expound upon this really interesting challenge?

Katie Robbert

Yeah, I think one of the things that that we as marketers run into, and we all do it myself and you included is we sort of get, we put on those blinders. And we kind of get stumped when our normal sources such as a Google Analytics or an SEO tool, or our social media data just aren’t providing the answers. And it can, if you’re not familiar with working in a data set, if you’re used to just like looking at a dashboard or pulling down, you know, your rent your regular, you know, engagement and likes metrics, working with an outside data set can be a little intimidating, but what you and I are finding is that is the only way to really get the full story of what’s happening. And so, we were recently, you know, just randomly chatting about a couple of things in our slack channels. And you came upon this idea to investigate, which you know, often happens, you know, you’ll take a look at data on A Saturday night of data that we wouldn’t normally look at for the company. But that might answer an interesting question. So you’ve used third party data sources such as census data, Bureau of Labor Statistics, you know, you’ve looked at data sets that one wouldn’t necessarily think to pull into their marketing set. So I guess I would pose the question back to you of where does one even start to think about what other data is out there?

Christopher Penn

It depends on what you’re looking for. So a couple of years ago, we were doing some work for was it was a Pfizer, the the pharmaceutical company and one of the things that was a discussion point with them was they cannot use certain marketing tactics they you know, it is extremely difficult for them to use Google ads or Facebook or any of these things to market their products. They cannot for example, they cannot mention their product by name. What a what a difficult challenge for our a marketer to be able to say like, yeah, you cannot mention your product by name, you can only talk about what they call disease, state awareness. Here’s the problem, you’ll learn more about the problem. And by the way, we have the solution for it in the form of this pill or that pill. And so when we talk about understanding a topic, one of the first places to look is what people are talking about and what people are searching for. So search tools are relatively agnostic, although they tend to work with the main search engines, Google thing, etc. But t