The age of digitization has led companies to shift their marketing weight, and the dollars behind internet based initiatives. Companies run multiple campaigns on different channels. Marketing Analytics is a way of capturing the efficacy and the efficiency of these marketing campaigns. Spend on marketing is a resource suspect to wastage if not tuned and targeted properly. Recently, the global behemoths Proctor & Gamble, and Unilever decided to shelve their digital ad spent by 41% and 59% respectively. They determined that their advertisement dollars deployed on the different websites was not bringing the customer footfalls they were expecting. Since the avenues for the users’ interactions with the brands become more widespread, companies have to figure out ways to unify those metrics.
Any organization requires a good marketing analytics team which can derive these useful insights. The best time to build a marketing analytics team would be once the company has already registered its presence in a limited geography, and seeks to expand across regions and domains. While data is central to any analytics, a proper marketing team would ensure that your ROI goals are met. The key to marketing analytics is data, and companies should strive to save data about campaigns. For example, track the number of unique customers for email-based campaign, and then compare it with the data from the previous quarter when the marketing campaign was launched on Facebook.
A marketing analytics can help organizations in customer acquisitions and focus on markets previously left unexplored. The team should comprise of people with the following skill sets:
Programming with Big-Data:
Every click, view, skip, and scroll through by the user is captured. To make sense of data of this volume, it needs to be scrubbed, cleaned and processed, noise removed and the insights received in real time. This requires familiarity with the Big Data stack and programming paradigm. A team doing marketing analytics requires big data engineers to bring data in a palatable format.
Data Science:
While engineers can transfer business logic to code, the team needs to have a data scientist to build the correct business logic. There are many variables, and the data science techniques are required to discover hidden patterns.
Social Media Experts:
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Google figure in the top 10 websites accessed in the world. Therefore, most marketing campaigns would need to work with these websites to engage customers. These websites can provide the functionality of targeted ads, as well as broad customer overreach. The social media experts’ task would be to figure out the best way to utilize the tools offered by these websites, and also track the efficiency.
Domain Experts:
Every marketing campaign would have different needs. A campaign for a fast food chain restaurant would be run differently than a campaign for running shoes. A one size fits all policy will be ineffective. A marketing analytics team would require people from different domains, preferably covering all the major verticals so that they can be useful to different use cases.
Business Analysts
Business analysts would be required for resource allocation, and optimizations, and measuring its financial impact. Marketing analytics will have to be constrained by the financial realities of the company, a business analyst can be a bridge between the insights of the market analytics team and the possibilities of actualization of those recommendations based on the business realities (like the number of new sales representatives who need to be hired, or transferred etc).
At the end of the day, a strong analytical marketing team would be able to support the organisation through a data-driven marketing plan. The question now is whether your data is ready for analytics?
