A Successful Marketing Analytics Journey

Recently I had 2 very interesting conversations with the marketing teams who are working on defining and implementing a comprehensive marketing analytics strategy across their organizations. Across these 2 and many other similar conversations that I have had, I observe 2 common themes:

1. Ability to have the insights into sales and marketing performance especially around pipeline impact is a key priority for all marketing organizations irrespective of the industry and size. Marketing analytics has emerged to be one of the key competencies that define modern marketing organizations.
2. Marketing analytics tends to be a more technical conversation than traditional marketing automation, email marketing. Given this, in the beginning, most of the marketing teams struggle with figuring out the right approach for starting with marketing analytics.  Limelight, as always, tends to be about which fancy tools to use from the marketing tech stack. It shifts the focus towards the tools and dashboards being the pillars of a successful marketing analytics strategy without paying the needed attention to the underlying business needs that actually define marketing analytics and its success for any any organization.

The second theme is one of the key reasons why many of the marketing analytics projects either fail at adding real value for the organizations or worse, they even fail to get started at the first place.

Across all my engagements at marqeu, I have been building marketing analytics, BI and data warehousing infrastructure (using popular tools and technologies like Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Alteryx, SQL, Python, MySQL, Periscope, Looker, Tableau, QlikView, PowerBI) and self serve dashboards that bring to life the underlying marketing analytics strategies. Even though bulk of the work across marketing analytics tends to be fairly technical in nature but the success of marketing analytics does not entirely depend on which fancy tools and technologies organizations use.

You could be driving one of the most fancy cars but without having a plan around where you are headed and journey details for the GPS, the fancy car ride is only as good as sitting in the parking lot.

In the post, I would like to take the opportunity to shed some light on the approach that I have been taking with all our customers to enable them to successfully implement the marketing analytics strategies. It is always an exciting journey for any organization to have the capabilities in place that enable them to track these critical data points related to marketing performance so that each team member is able to actively contribute towards fostering a data-driven culture within the organization. These KPIs provide strategic insights to the marketing leaders and CMOs so that they can confidently demonstrate the impact that their organizations are making and help foster a strong working relationship for marketing within the c-suite, especially with the CFOs.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

I could not agree more with Mr. Tzu but I tend to respectfully disagree with him when it comes to the journey of marketing analytics. In his defense, I am sure that he did not have marketing analytics at top of the mind while writing these beautiful words.

To get started with a successful marketing analytics journey, instead of a single step, there are 3 monumental steps that should be taken together to define the success:

• • Sales and marketing organizations coming together to define the key business questions the related data points which provides insights into the health of the business. The focus here should primarily be on the questions and insights the boards would care for. Needless to say, the folks on the boards are not smart enough to make sense of fancy metrics as email opens, percentage growth in webinar sign-ups and events attendance etc. Like sales teams, they live and breathe pipeline and revenue numbers. The business questions agreed upon in this step should focus on getting clear visibility into the pipeline health and forecasts.

• • Once these business questions are defined, they need to be translated into the key performance indicators (KPIs) and their associated definitions or what we call in the field marketing analytics, what fields and fields values along with the logic defines those KPIs. 100% clarity on the definitions of these KPIs is critical for making sure business leaders have the confidence in the numbers that these KPIs would eventually represent. We, marketers, tend to have comparatively less patience when it comes to marketing analytics in particular.  Many times I have seen this step of thoroughly defining and documenting the KPIs being skipped in the pursuit of getting started with building the dashboards ASAP so that teams can start reporting on the numbers and performance. While this enthusiasm is commendable but without these definitions in place, business leaders end up not having full confidence in the numbers and it always goes down-hill from there. This is the situation that I have seen coming up most often and it should be avoided at all costs especially when the marketing analytics strategy is being implemented the very first time. More than anything else, the faith in the numbers being reported on is of the paramount importance in defining the success of marketing analytics projects. Even if it pushes out project timelines by a few days, it is always in the best interest of everyone to go the extra mile to get these KPIs defined and documented before starting with the implementation.

• • Start building the culture of leveraging data in all conversations. Business leaders should not wait for all the dashboards and analytics frameworks to be in place to start having data-driven conversations with the teams. Modern marketing and sales platforms make it easy to get basic performance metrics and data points on the fly. Starting the conversations with these metrics and adding more of pipeline impact related metrics as soon as they are made available is the best approach. Building and fostering a data-driven culture in any organization takes time. When it comes to marketing analytics, this is what truly differentiates a successful organization.

Starting the marketing analytics journey with the right approach will not only define its success but will also instill confidence in the users, marketing analytics teams and the business leaders when it comes to leveraging data and insights for making decisions.

We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing and sales communities to keep adding value for our customers. We welcome the inputs from other leaders and practitioners around what approaches they are taking to make operational marketing analytics strategy across their organizations.