Take Your Marketing Effectiveness to the Next Level
It's time for Omni-Channel to take your marketing effectiveness to the next level!
Great new article by Datorama’s CSO, Katrin Ribant, which explains in a very simple way how marketers can effectively engage with their audiences in today’s multi-channel world. Read More
As consumers are faced with an ever-growing number of resources that allow them to research, compare and buy the products they want, marketers are faced with an ever-growing number of channels, technologies and interaction platforms that they need to manage. Managing information coming from these marketing actions in order to understand and better engage your audiences while simultaneously driving bottom line growth is a challenge that, if overcome, creates a huge marketing impact on business results. From more relevant lead generation for sales in B2B marketing, to higher engagement levels of consumer communities for B2C marketing, better marketing means better business results… and better marketing comes from knowing where you should focus your efforts.
This is where marketing intelligence can help you: information is the key to better decision-making. In today’s multi-everything marketing world, information is fragmented across a multitude of ad management platforms, internal information systems and manual spreadsheets tracking results of individual actions and campaigns.
Accessing this information and putting it together in a coherent way so it can be sliced, diced and drilled for insights (that can, subsequently, help you understand the impact of your marketing actions on your audiences) has never been more important.
Compared to just a few years ago, you can now use a social listening tool to understand how consumers react to your latest ad campaign. Do they like your messaging? Do they think you are talking about topics that are relevant to them?
Even more interestingly, learnings about the effectiveness of a given marketing action measured by customer response in one channel can today be applied seamlessly to myriad other marketing channels.
For example, when using a channel such as paid search, you can now measure customer response to your marketing promotions in near real-time and understand if one type of promotion drives better response then another type of promotion. Using these insights, you can now modify the messaging used in other channels such as television or direct mail to make sure you address your audiences in the most relevant manner.
These kinds of insights used to take days or weeks to trickle up to the strategic levels of a marketing department, at which point applying them to any further channel in the same marketing program would take yet another few days, weeks or even months to trickle back down to the operational and execution layers and get implemented.
Data-driven marketing is based on using information derived from statistics related to your marketing actions and their effects on customers, prospects and ultimately, your bottom line. The increasing complexity of the marketing landscape and the growing latitude consumers have in making choices mean that no one marketer can intuitively understand how consumers will react to a marketing program anymore. Although nothing will replace the knowledge of your business and your customers, today’s environment calls for hard evidence to direct your decisions. Accountability is the key to building confidence in marketing decisions across an organization, and the path to accountability is data-driven marketing.
To help you foster a data-driven culture in your organization, tools that are accessible and cater to marketers’ workflows and needs are a must. In the face of the growing amount of data and the complexity/variety of data sources involved in marketing, using only Excel is not an option for making serious data-driven decisions today. In-house systems can be important and get you some of the way, but what you really need is a full business intelligence platform that works at the speed of marketing.
Originally posted by Datorama