"Give us actionable insights, not more data.” – I hear this all the time in meetings with marketers. Today’s C-level brand marketers are facing innumerable tactical and structural challenges when it comes to managing and making sense of their own measurement data.
There’s a desperate need for clear, accessible insights into media performance that empower all teams across an enterprise to understand media’s real impact on their business so they can optimize where needed.
And yet they struggle to translate performance data into actionable insights that improve business and customer value.
Too many marketing teams are overwhelmed by data fragmentation, privacy restrictions, skill gaps, technology limitations, and just plain old legacy systems and antiquated thinking within their own organizations that leave them unable to fully address and overcome their day-to-day measurement hurdles.
I totally get it.
The operational overhead required to arrive at a singular, reliable answer from multiple data sources is often too burdensome to keep pace with the speed at which brands operate today. And triangulating media performance data in-house from multiple sources requires lining up incongruent data sources that are not always apples to apples.
When multiple methodologies are deployed across teams and the business, there is confusion and chaos, resulting in a subjective interpretation of media performance, misalignment, and a lack of decision-making ability.
The Dangers of Operational Silos and Waste
Recent insights from The CMO Survey revealed that 61% of senior marketers found that demonstrating the impact of their marketing actions on financial outcomes was a major challenge – and 42% were challenged when it came to focusing data and analytics on their most important marketing problems.
The CMO Survey also found that 62% of marketing activities use martech tools, up from 58.4% just one year ago, yet only 56.4% of those tools purchased are being used – making a shared cross-enterprise strategy a low priority.
As marketers struggle to efficiently turn data into the actionable information they need, there is also a notable discrepancy (in some cases) between what science is telling them and what businesses actually do with that information.
Are they authentically using data insights to drive better business decisions? Or is data kept in isolated, operational silos? We all know that unless data is used to directly inform decisions that drive better outcomes for the business, it’s useless.
No one is saying “no” to measurement data or to gaining greater insight into how every media dollar is performing. But so many marketers express to me in these early-stage meetings that they find it difficult to utilize data efficiently, and a surprising number don’t even trust their own data in the first place.
The Data and Technology Disconnect
Executives and channel managers require vastly different cuts of performance data in order to effectively make media investment decisions, especially when brand teams are tasked with analyzing and allocating marketing spend across a large mix of channels at a variety of levels.
Citing another recent survey that underscores this point, a Deloitte Digital survey (nicely summarized by the WSJ) found that marketers felt that “disconnected data and technologies often produce contradictory results while failing to produce cross-channel insights,” and that “these challenges are compounded by organizational silos that result in various teams having their own fragmented view of the customer.”
Additionally, marketers felt a lack of top-down vision from leadership regarding measurement, as well as poor buy-in from stakeholders. “Limited transparency” into the tools and models used for media measurement further erodes confidence.
Deloitte also found that many marketers recognize the need to overhaul their measurement operations and ecosystems to meet these challenges but they are uncertain about how to proceed.
A Best-in-Class Approach to Internal Alignment
Having a centralized measurement and optimization solution is critical for maximum brand velocity and growth. Whichever measurement system you decide to use for your brand, it’s imperative that everyone in your organization is in agreement that those numbers are the foundation of your organizational decision-making.
All key stakeholders consuming marketing performance reporting need to be aligned to the same metrics and a single source of truth to succeed in any capacity in today’s fast-paced, highly competitive marketplace.
That means investing in advanced measurement tools, skilled analysts, and strategies that can adapt to evolving privacy laws and complex consumer journeys, and it also means taking a best-in-class approach that is anchored on incrementality media measurement. When paired with strategic cross-functional alignment and institutional adoption, it will become a key part of the organizational muscle that creates a real competitive advantage and moves the needle for your business.
Here’s what you should expect from the best platforms in the industry today:
- A best-in-class platform leverages advanced AI, machine learning, and cutting-edge data science to deliver exceptional accuracy and speed.
- It automates the management, testing, and optimization of your media efforts, freeing your team to focus on strategic decisions while seamlessly integrating into your existing workflows.
- It integrates methods such as Incrementality Testing, Media Mix Modeling (MMM), and platform-reported attribution. This comprehensive approach provides a complete view across your marketing funnel, eliminating the need for fragmented tools and manual data processing.
- It automates complex tasks like geo-experiments and customer cohort testing, allowing you to set up geo-tests in minutes and run multiple tests simultaneously for richer insights with minimal effort.
- It provides a user-friendly interface tailored to various roles within your organization. Whether you’re an executive or an analyst, the platform provides the insights you need in a format that suits your responsibilities perfectly.
- And a best-in-class platform transforms your approach to marketing, by offering a seamless path from insight to action, empowering your team to optimize media spend and make confident strategic decisions.
Future-Forward Portfolio Performance
Addressing data challenges is crucial to being able to optimize marketing strategies and accurately assess campaign performance in a way that meets the needs of everyone in your organization, from executives, channel managers, to analysts – ensuring easy access to insights tailored to their responsibilities.
Measured is unique in that we have developed our entire data ingestion pipeline from the ground up to provide you with a fully-managed, all-in-one marketing data warehouse. Purpose-built to ingest your marketing, sales, and CRM data from over 300 integration partners, our data ingestion system means your team never has to worry about organizing marketing data again.
In today’s rapidly changing marketing environment, having a top-tier measurement and optimization platform is crucial for success. This is what we bring to marketers using Measured everyday.