Become a Marketing Analytics Superhero (Part One)

Whether you’re well on your way to becoming a marketing analytics superhero or new on the scene, it’s no secret that the marketing analytics industry is exploding. With numerous marketing systems generating mountains of data, it’s important to focus your efforts so you don’t get overwhelmed. Like everything else in life, “with great power comes great responsibility,” and marketing analytics is no exception.

Many companies rush into analyzing all available metrics without laying a basic foundation. Before any marketing analytics can be performed, companies must have a sound understanding of who they are. It’s imperative to define who your customers are, what your customers want, and what you can offer to satisfy those wants. Defining your company identity is essential to creating the content that will be used in campaigns to increase revenue. Once these key areas are defined, and you’ve begun your marketing activities, you can start using marketing analytics to grow your effectiveness.

As you begin your marketing analytics journey, employ a S.W.O.T. analysis to identify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats associated with your current marketing analytics practice. Once you’ve thought through your S.W.O.T analysis, the next stage of deploying a marketing analytics strategy is to establish clearly defined objectives that enable marketing decision leaders to easily detect the progress being made. Companies often fail at data-driven marketing strategies because they underestimate the power of having a well-defined plan from the get-go.

Even with a plan in place, every superhero knows there are obstacles that come along the way. If you’ve been doing this for a while, you know that complicated roadblocks come with the territory. In order to prevent you from running into marketing analytic kryptonite, we’ll discuss three of these obstacles in this two-part series. Get ready to power up your marketing analytics artillery belt!

Obstacle One: Where do we start?

One of the main reasons people avoid marketing measurement is the very first step: getting started. The “Big Data” eruption is a relatively new wrinkle that has some companies too scared to move forward. Companies are collecting copious amounts of data from multiple marketing and sales systems but don’t know what to do with the data. Decision makers are in the dark about what metrics are important and aren’t comfortable starting from scratch. They get stuck in “paralysis from analysis.” The abundance of data continues to grow, yet marketers don’t know where to turn.

What would a marketing analytics superhero do in such a situation? The simple solution, of course! Start small.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the mountains of data out there. You don’t need all the data; you need the right data. Identify a quick win in order to show your organization the benefits of marketing analytics. Marketing measurement can be as simple or complex as you make it. Often, companies will undergo a huge implementation process that’s simply too complex to handle for beginners. If you’re a novice superhero, your first encounter with unknown territory shouldn’t be flying all the way to planet Krypton. Similarly, companies wanting to measure campaign success must start small.

One of the first essential steps is to understand what actionable metrics are meaningful. A simple way to take action is to start tracking basic metrics such as website visits, length of visit, clicks, and downloads. These output metrics are crucial and a great place to get started…but they’re only the tip of the iceberg. When viewed in isolation, they don’t seem that important, but an email click may spiral a prospect to a website, which can be tracked. That click then leads to more strategic or long-term metrics, such as lifetime customer loyalty and revenue.

The next step is to gather data that moves beyond basic data that will help you start forecasting where someone is in the buying process. A click on a link, as an isolated incident, doesn’t say a lot. But, when a person has viewed the same web page for the fourth time this week and is looking at a particular product, you have a pattern developing that you can make marketing inferences from.

The final step of “Where do we start?” is to link CRM data with raw data. This enables more detailed insight about behavioral outcomes and allows superhero marketers the ability to effectively target individuals based on their unique needs.

There are more marketing analytic superhero obstacles to come in part two. Stay tuned!