I’m not one of those creative types who shun data. But nothing frustrates me more than when I hear another agency go on and on about testing everything they are doing online without a clear understanding of the brand or its value with the audiences the brand engages. While relying on data for insights and using it to benchmark is important, it is essential that brands don’t over-rely on information to the point where they lose sight of brand strategy.

Google is a great example of a company that tends to rely very heavily on A/B testing of creative to draw conclusions about the brand. However, testing various shades of blue on a button and measuring incremental differences in clicks doesn’t tell the whole story. Or, in some cases, any of the story.

The emotional connection we have with brands is tenuous at best. So when you finally have the right messaging down for your audiences, you can end up doing more harm than good by involving too much testing. That’s why creative people are so good at their jobs. You tell them what to say, and they tell you how to say it. And there are a lot of ways to do that. But, it’s a delicate formula of emotion, reason and persuasion that they’re able to bring to the equation that no data ever can.

The problem for non-creative, data-driven folks is that because there are so many ways to tell the right story, they think any version of the story will do and testing will allow for one that with the highest conversion rate to rise to the top. This approach has a major flaw.

This line of thinking requires a complete overhaul. It’s like this: you can spend a lot of money and time driving a high volume of people to your website, but if only a small percentage ever actually buy from you, then the rest are not contributing to your bottom line. What I’m proposing is instead of driving 10,000 people to check out your products and having a 100 of them purchase, which translates to a 1% conversion rate, it’s far more effective to attract 1,000 highly engaged people and have 100 of them convert.

This shift in thinking means instead of going after the largest numbers of people and continually optimizing to get them to convert, having an established, refined brand message that only gets delivered to the core audience of your brand can save time and money. Additionally, your brand will avoid the damage by not contributing to poor brand communications that are not in alignment with what your audiences care about most. Not to mention, that conversion rate of yours just skyrocketed to 10%.

Burger King understands this well.

They accumulated ton of Facebook followers over time because at some point in the past someone decided that quantity is better than quality. It’s not. Most of those followers didn’t really care about the restaurant chain so engagement was lackluster and not doing the brand much good. Fortunately, Burger King saw the opportunity to approach social media differently and developed a brilliant campaign to get unengaged users to unfollow Burger King’s Facebook page by buying them off of it. The audience they had left were not only true fans, but helped properly influence others to the best of what Burger King has to offer.

This is why it’s critical to use data to help tell your story and not use it to make every decision about it. Data doesn’t account for emotion or the subjective nature of an idea. It can help refine it. It can help you make better decisions. It just shouldn’t be the only way to decide what kind of strategy to implement.