Authored by Nick Scott | Director, Data Analytics
Data analytics are essential to understanding customer motivation, maximizing the impact of marketing campaigns, and capturing ROI. But you already know that. What you might not know is that 26% of CMOs cite marketing data and analytics as a top-three capability gap. As a marketing executive, this data point (unfortunately) might not surprise you. With the majority of CMOs and marketing leaders reporting that budget is their most stretched resource, it’s not always feasible to hire a full-time, in-house analytics expert. But is this skill gap hurting you?
The short answer: Yes, yes it is.
The long answer: Executive-level visibility into marketing performance, investments, and ROI is necessary to optimize strategies and define best practices. Beyond that, it helps get you the budget increases you need to amplify measurable results. If you don’t have the necessary resources to effectively analyze and communicate valuable data insights, you’ll struggle to recognize and communicate the value of your efforts. This can impact overall performance and lead to less spending on future campaigns, or worse, an overall budget reduction.
Here are the main problems we hear from senior leaders in marketing, do these sound familiar?
- The volume of data provided by multiple marketing tools is overwhelming
- The majority of platforms and tools in use are not integrated, which requires manual efforts to pull reports
- Information is often siloed by department (marketing, sales, IT, customer success, etc.)
- Lack of ownership and control of data, requiring reliance on agency partners and third-party vendors
- By the time reports are assembled and shared, the data is already lagging
All these challenges lead to difficulty distinguishing between various campaigns, lost productivity, heightened potential for errors, and inaccurate and/or lagging data. When marketing teams cannot effectively analyze or grasp valuable data insights, they struggle to recognize and communicate the value of their efforts. This can impact overall performance and lead to less spending on future campaigns, or worse, an overall budget reduction.
Here’s how to achieve marketing data visibility for your organization despite data overload, disparate systems, and limited budgets.
1. Outsource Data Analytics Capabilities
This isn’t a sales pitch. We already know the analytics capabilities of most marketing teams fall short of what’s required to turn information into business intelligence. It’s not a dig at your team or your leadership; it’s just the nature of marketing. Analytics can be complex, and marketing teams are perpetually under-resourced (we get it). But for a fraction of the cost of hiring an experienced, full-time, in-house resource, you can get an entire team of experts who can support your data automation, management, analytics, and reporting requirements. It will be a smart investment… maybe even the best investment you make in 2023.
2. Standardize Marketing Metrics and KPIs
Lacking clearly defined strategies for goal tracking and customer journey best practices is the pits. Your team is out there innovating, creating, campaigning, fervently executing, and staying competitive—only to struggle to tell if any of it is actually working. When is there time to define every single KPI?! And yet, we both know standardizing methods for collecting, evaluating, and measuring success across the full suite of digital marketing channels is non-negotiable. It’s critical to achieve not only marketing goals but business goals. Take the time to refine and standardize goal management to ensure your team is effectively tracking and measuring the end-to-end user journey and ROI. Then, support it with data. As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding.
3. Centralize Data into a Single Source
Imagine what your marketing team could accomplish with data, not only at its fingertips but accessible in one centralized dashboard. This looks like:
- Integrating and automating data across core business applications and workflows
- Leveraging intuitive dashboards with filtering capabilities to enrich the data
- Providing comprehensive views of performance funnels that originate from analytics tools
- Creating accurate, real-time reports to communicate insights
A modern, integrated data platform can optimize your marketing initiatives while decreasing costs—because now your team can identify which investments are producing results. Say goodbye to manual efforts, forget isolated information, and kick error-prone reporting to the curb. Plus, the overall security of your data is enhanced when once-disparate platforms are integrated and communicating. A centralized dashboard becomes the single source of truth for you, your team, and executive leadership. Visibility. Achieved.
While this all sounds idyllic, knowing where/how to start is where things can get overwhelming. Don’t let that stop you from starting. The best thing to do is gather information. After all, if your team is building a paid campaign to promote a new product, you wouldn’t just throw some copy together, quickly create a graphic, and push it out to the world. No. You would perform market research, define your user profile, talk with internal stakeholders, collaborate with sales, define KPIs, etc. The same applies here. Information is power, and we want you to feel in control.
This part is the sales pitch… but with no strings attached.
Let us provide the information you need to get started. We want to hear your frustrations, learn what you would like to accomplish with data, and understand how current platforms are helping or hindering your efforts. Pick our brains, and we’ll see if we can help you get one step closer to true data-driven marketing. You can schedule a session with me by clicking the link below, or simply clicking here.
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