ESPN reported Coach Doc Rivers’ “Ubuntu” mantra helped lead the Boston Celtics to the 2008 NBA championship, the franchise’s first title in more than 20 years.  

Rivers leaned into the team’s “collective success,” elevating team unity to a competitive advantage.  

An “Ubuntu” focus makes sense for marketers, too. You need the marketing team’s collective talent to build brand awareness and accelerate buyer demand. Rivers used an X’s and O’s playbook to rally his team. Marketing leaders should deploy data to accomplish the same.  

Choosing the Right Metrics for a Digital Visibility Audit 

You don’t need more data to build a playbook, just a deep focus on select pre-funnel, correlative channel metrics. These are the metrics that rise and fall together – an increase in organic web traffic after a product launch, or an increase in brand search web traffic following strategic earned media coverage.  

A slow marketing qualified lead (MQL) start is hard to overcome. PAN’s new Digital Visibility Audit (DiVA) playbook demonstrates how 12 pre-funnel metrics, when analyzed holistically, identify early indicators of success or failure, giving you and your team time to optimize or pivot.  

A few examples of DiVA metrics to help your team identify gaps in the awareness to consideration stage of the buyer’s journey include: 

• Branded Search Visibility  

• Strategic Search Visibility 

• High-Value Page Traffic 

• Media Share of Voice (SOV) 

• Social Media Share of Voice (SOV) 

• Social Power of Voice 

Gathering Actionable Insights from DiVA Data 

So, what types of insights do these metrics show you? And how does this lead to working more effectively with other departments?  

Here are some recent data quandaries DiVA surfaced:  

• Example 1: The PR team reported a 50% SOV increase over the prior quarter. The web team reports flat site sessions during the same period.  

• Example 2: The web team reports increased site sessions during the same period the demand generation team reported lower than forecasted marketing qualified leads (MQLs).  

• Example 3: The digital marketing team reports an increase in overall keywords ranked in the top 10 results on Google. The PR team reports none of the top terms align with the information driving earned media coverage.  

Anyone on the marketing team, whether it be the head of communications or demand generation manager, can tap the right colleagues to sort through the data challenges exposed in these three examples. That’s a key benefit to this playbook. Increased data literacy allows teams to connect around planning and problem resolution.  

How to Kick Off a Digital Visibility Audit 

Our new eBook, The Value of Data in the Digital World, provides a list of 12 key pre-funnel metrics, detailed metric definitions and thought-starter questions to help jump-start ideation and root analysis discussions. It shows how to tackle the data examples above, and more.  

The abundance of data in a marketing organization, plus the demands of competing priorities, pull your marketing organization in too many directions. Using select pre-funnel, correlative channel metrics coordinates the right kind of action, and helps to synchronize your team’s priorities around a common goal.  

It’s been reported that Doc Rivers has also shared his Ubuntu principles with his new team. Which makes it more of a long-term strategy then a pep talk. That’s good news for his LA Clippers. Bad news for the rest of the NBA.