Data carries an ever-important role for the sports media professional – both as an individual content creator and as part of a content team, and especially in the modern age. Producing data-driven content helps you stay in line with trends, capitalize on at-large interest, and hones your own adaptability and versatility as a creator.
Data is the key to helping you make informed decisions regarding your content strategy and execution. We’ve talked before about how to analyze, sort, and extrapolate data – but how can you properly contextualize that data, so that you take what you need from it? Here’s a look.
4 Ways to Contextualize Data and Improve Decision Making
1) Pinpoint What the Data Represents
When you seek to contextualize a data set that’s already been cleaned and organized, your first step is to qualify the data beyond its quantitative numerical state. Ask yourself: What does this data mean? What does this data effectively represent?
Once you pinpoint what a set of data represents, you can then extrapolate greater strategic meanings from the trends that you find within. For example, social impressions would signify a particular audience’s attention toward your brand. And if certain posts garner more social impressions, the strategic implication might favor more posts of that style.
2) Identify Trends and Patterns
Identifying trends and patterns is the next step of the contextualization process. Here, you’re taking an uninterpreted data set and interpreting strategic meaning from it by isolating correlations in your content performance.
By identifying trends and patterns in your content performance data, you can learn to look at your content plan objectively. You might have a soft spot for a certain piece or a certain video style, but if the numbers don’t correlate to success, it might be time to shift your strategy and try something new. With trends, you can see what works and what doesn’t, and experiment accordingly.
3) Recognize Situational Factors and Events
Ironically, another major part of “contextualizing” data is recognizing the context of content performance. What situational factors might have impacted your content? Were there events, or a lack thereof, that impacted audience interest or engagement? Were there market disruptions that affected your reach? Will these disruptions impact your strategy moving forward?
Situational context analysis is more of an outward contextualization, but it’s nonetheless important for delineating where you stand in the current sports media industry environment. With up-to-date exterior knowledge and an objective understanding of your interior content performance trends, you can navigate this environment effectively.
4) Take an Action-Based Approach
With your data, always take an action-based approach. The data itself is a mere tool for analysis. But every data set might dictate a certain action from you and your team. Come prepared with that action-based mindset, and be on the lookout for the action your data might prescribe.
Do you need to scale back certain posts on social media? Do you need to minimize short-form standardized content? Do you need to lean more into storytelling? Produce enough, and you’ll have the data to guide you. By taking an action approach, you invest in this data and proactively ensure that you won’t get caught stagnating.
Playbook
- Pinpoint what the data means
- Identify trends and patterns
- Recognize situational factors
- Take an action approach
