The Unspoken Analytics Challenge

While on a trip away with family and friends over the weekend, I had a conversation with one of my friends, who also happens to work in the marketing analytics space.

As part of his remit, he had identified the need to find and select a marketing measurement partner, not only to provide the business with the ability to have a more comprehensive view of marketing performance, but ultimately be able to better plan and guide the overall marketing investment strategy, to maximize its potential return.

So far, so good right! Well, this leads to my friend’s next comment…

“I hope we can find a way to carve out a test region to further validate the findings.”

This is the unspoken challenge. A crazy percentage of marketing analytics learnings and findings are not acted on in real life, essentially becoming another PowerPoint deck that collects proverbial dust.

Let’s address some of the reasons why this happens in organizations.

• Your analytics group does not manage marketing activation, this will fall on either internal teams or agencies.

• These activation groups are often siloed, with focus on TV, digital, OOH, etc.

  • If working with an agency, there are often procurement lead goals that they must deliver on, which are connected to quality, cost, and delivery of media, but NOT outcomes from media.

    • These changes may inadvertently create a fiscal penalty to the agency, while ultimately providing better impact for the clients.

• If there are recommendations that shifts investment $$$ from one activation group to another, this will often be met with resistance.

The list goes on, but I believe the point is clear and, if we don’t address it upfront, there will likely be pushbacks to optimizations opportunities, which greatly diminishes the value and impact of marketing analytics.

Ok, so let’s talk about how we can address these challenges and look at solutions to this problem:

• Create and align on a test, validation, and roll out of measurement findings with all parts of the organization.

  • This can be internal and external if you have agency partners for activation.

  • Creating clear optimization cycles, with feedback and input from all activation groups will gradually reduce these points of friction, especially if this translates into a focus on business growth.

• Create flexibility in procurement goals for media.

  • You want to ensure that you are getting quality media, but outcomes are more important for your business.

  • This approach will allow your agency to more effectively shift media $ to that end.

    • The agency should not be penalized for making decisions that ultimately benefit your company.

• Create a culture that is hyper focused on growth and impact.

  • Great analytics is fully integrated into the activation process. You also need the media experts to help validate the potential opportunities within each channel, as your models don’t necessarily understand that.

    • Example – If search is your best channel, you still need to apply sound Search principles. If you are already at full-capacity with what you can effectively spend based on position, keyword strategy, etc. Then move on to the next channel to see what expansion opportunities there may be!

So as a final takeaway…

Great analytics only delivers on its value potential when it’s fully integrated and adopted by the whole organization, and when likely points of friction are either removed or minimized.

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