Becoming a credit union data scientist

by Jonathan Lay

Looking back on how we used to operate as a business, many of our decisions were based solely upon gut-level creative decisions. Personally speaking, the majority of the videos I produced were a direct result of either creatively mimicking pop culture or wanting challenge myself and acquire new skills.

Once these projects were completed, I found success was measured from praise from the client and the number of views it received on YouTube.

How that strategy has shifted over the past year.

Let’s continue to look at videos briefly. The number of views is just one metric to consider when reviewing the success, or failure, of the project. Viewer engagement, video length, play rate, other videos watched, thumnail used, and the action taken, if any, as a result of watching a video should be studied. And if appropriate, the knowledge gained should be considered when planning the next video.

That same methodology is now being broadly applied internally as well as with our clients. And the data stretches from web traffic to lead scoring, to webinar attendees and post survey engagement to email open rates and, yes, even opt outs.

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It is this information that allows us to better understand you: the audience.

And, in turn, it allows us to write better content, produce better videos, and plan more effectively for future digital engagement.

For us internally, no longer are our decisions merely rooted in the flavor of the week we are craving. Part of this can be attributed to the maturation process of a small business. And part of this can be credited back to the valuable insights we have gained through our ongoing analysis of all our data.

Now this is not to say that we ignored this information in the past. However, I do not think we were necessarily concerned about the minutiae, which is where some of the greatest insights lie. And to speak bluntly, we were more concerned about how shiny of an object we could create versus all the data, all the information, and all the potential insight we could gain from a particular campaign.

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