Previously, I was writing about the strategic consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and their recent flurry of articles about marketing in a downturn (see “Measuring Marketing” and “The downturn’s new rules for marketers”). One of the fascinating facts in the first article is that less than 20% of companies actually quantitatively analyze their data on marketing spend. This is despite the fact that over 60% of companies reported that they did indeed track media, personnel, and creative costs.
They have the data - they just don't analyze it.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="330" caption="To think you had all of that data and just needed a way to put it together."]
[/caption]So the hidden message from the article is that the answers for achieving better marketing effectiveness are probably in your hands already. You have the data. The issue just becomes how can you connect it all together and analyze it? And how can you do that quickly?
Marketing can be particularly tough to analyze, for the following reasons:
- There are many different types of marketing activities to analyze. Even small companies do online advertising, print advertising, webinars, in-person events, etc. All of these activities involve different and multiple vendors, such as creative designers, media outlets, marketing consultants, etc.
- There are a lot of different data sources to analyze. Each activity, with each vendor, produces different data that resides in different places. Running search ads on Google and Yahoo? Two data sources. Did email blasts with 5 different media lists? 5 different data sources.
- Marketing impact can be tough to manage, because it might be measured in multiple places. That online advertising results in hits to your website, online signups, calls to the sales team, etc. How can you track all of those different impacts in one place?
So it makes sense that while over 60% of companies have the data, only 20% of them go through the time and effort to analyze it. Especially if you're using traditional analysis solutions, it can be expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to tie all of these data sources together.
This is where on-demand business intelligence solutions can come in. A modern solution that makes it easier to pull information from disparate sources and analyze it in one place, for a more affordable cost, becomes critical.
At Birst, we have Birst Connect, which allows you to automatically pull information from various databases and data sources on a regular basis, according to the schedule that you set. For something like marketing analytics, that dramatically alleviates the burden of data integration.
So instead of having to be concerned about the tying together of information, marketing managers can focus on simply ensuring that the data can be tied together. It's a task, but a much smaller one than doing things manually, which is what many people are doing today, or not doing it at all, which is a risky path in today's economy.
For more on marketing reporting and analysis, check out the Marketing Analytics section on the updated Birst website. You can also check out this free recorded webinar called "Put Marketing in the Driver's Seat."
