Marketing goes hand-in-hand with data—about campaign performance, customer behavior, return on investment, you-name-it. This is nothing new. Marketers have always depended closely on metrics for insight into how things are going, and to decide their next moves.
But today’s marketers have access to advanced analytics that would have been a pipe dream even a few years in the past. The potential for marketers to harness the power of the powerful data analytics available today is there; but they’ll need to figure out how to overcome certain challenges in order to reap genuine value from stored data. Here are five of those challenges.
Disconnect Between Marketers & Data
According to Gartner, 69 percent of marketing leaders in 2016 expected to be making a majority of their decisions based on data by 2018. And marketing analytics accounts for the largest single share of marketing budgets, to boot. But many marketers still feel quite distanced from data, despite the fact there’s more of it available than ever before.
It’s sort of like the conundrum outlined in a famous Coleridge poem, where there’s water everywhere but not a drop to drink. Data is next to useless for marketing teams unless it’s in a format they can actually use—even if there’s a lot of it to go around.
Marketers know they stand to seriously benefit from tapping into all that stored data. It’s a veritable treasure trove just waiting to be unlocked. But there are a few things standing in the way—like a lack of access to business intelligence (BI) tools, or training needed to instill the confidence to query data and interpret answers.
The solution is two-fold, as marketing teams across every industry imaginable are discovering.
First, deploying data analytics tools accessible to non-technical users is key. Although marketers are well-versed in marketing metrics, a majority do not have the insight into technical data analytics on par with an analyst or IT specialist. So, it follows that the tools must be convenient, understandable and hassle-free for the average marketer.
The second piece of the puzzle is helping marketers feel confident using analytics, through training and data literacy. Empowering people to use tools starts with teaching them how, and then encouraging the entire marketing team to make analytics a regular part of their workflow. Leaders can set a good example by adopting these tools enthusiastically and making data part of the overall conversation.
Lack of Concrete Goals & Objectives
There’s so much data nowadays that sometimes the biggest challenge is homing in on which insights are relevant. Without concrete goals and objectives, marketers often struggle to understand why they’re crunching the numbers, even if they have the tools to do so.
Narrow down relevant metrics to a manageable number of key performance indicators (KPIs) and make sure every marketer understands the importance of each one.
Struggling with Legacy BI Systems
Legacy BI tools might seem more cost effective to keep around. But there’s actually a significant price tag to doing so. The currency? Missed opportunity to capitalize on data insights that could translate to direct value for the company.
The main drawback of legacy tools is that extracting insights usually relies heavily on data specialists. So, marketers experience delays between asking questions and receiving answers because they’re forced to wait for analysts to produce the report, and these analysts are usually facing backlogs of reporting requests.
But that’s all changing. The CMO and brand managers at a Fortune 500 Telecom company used marketing analytics from ThoughtSpot to instantly analyze campaign performance and weekly churn—and were then able to decrease customer churn by an expected 17 percent as a result. It’s safe to say that it’d be impossible, or at least much more challenging, to critically analyze week-over-week churn if this marketing team had to wait on insights rather than being able to crunch the numbers themselves and get answers in seconds.
Legacy BI simply lacks the speed and accessibility that are needed in today’s fast-paced marketing landscape.
Suspicion Remains About AI Analytics
At its best, artificial intelligence-powered data analytics can help marketers identify their best customers, predict customer behavior, understand the company pipeline and much more—all without human biases slipping into the mix.
But one executive points out that many marketers are still wary of AI-driven analytics “either because they don’t know how to use it properly or are feeling threatened by it.”
Again, data literacy training is key. So is showing marketers exactly how your analytics platform arrived at an insight; only with complete transparency will people learn to trust these systems. Highlight the benefits of harnessing the latest AI in BI, and reward employees for making the jump to data-driven marketing.
Proactively addressing these four challenges in modern marketing analytics will give your team the best chance of overcoming them to extract maximum value from data.
