Original blog by: Patricia Nishiyama (Director of Product Marketing, Analytics Cloud)
We’ve all been there: You’ve come up with a great marketing campaign, you’ve defined a differentiated value proposition, you’ve developed all the right assets, you’ve even carved out the perfect segmentation model. You’re off to the races, and things seem to be progressing smoothly. Then, suddenly, your seemingly perfect campaign disappears into a black hole of someone else’s analytic system.
Although you essentially created the campaign yourself, someone else pushes the “go” button on it, so you don’t actually have direct access to the metrics of that campaign. Unless, of course, you ask for them. And if you ask nicely, in comes that lovely spreadsheet filled with the data that you can hold up as a shining beacon of success. Sure, it makes no sense to anyone, but that’s beside the point.
Off in another department, your colleague is working on his marketing contribution by keeping the company website up and running. Engaging copy, quality assets, SEO optimization, and a modern look and feel make your customers come back wanting more. And the website is optimized for mobile, so no worries there. Like you, your colleague also has to go somewhere else to get his metrics, so he approaches the back-end web team and asks for the website performance. Click-through rates, bounce rates, direct traffic, organic traffic, keyword performance … and so on. More data-heavy spreadsheets to sort through.
And then there’s social media. This is the all-important-but-difficult-to-quantify piece of the marketing mix that gets a lot of love and attention but has its own set of challenges when it comes to measuring attribution. Your other young, hip colleague who runs social media has assured everyone that measuring these channels is about more than the number of followers and likes, it’s about brand sentiment, audience demographics, identifying optimal times for engagement, and so on. More data, more spreadsheets.
I could go on, of course. I could mention other parts of the marketing organization—brick-and-mortar campaigns, digital ads, television ads, print ads, live events—but I think you get the point. With so many customer touchpoints, it’s difficult to find out exactly which touchpoint is the most effective. And if you don’t know what is most (or least) effective, how do you know where to direct your marketing budget? Where are you having the biggest impact on the business? When your CEO and CMO ask your boss about their marketing ROI, this seemingly simple request unveils a baffling collection of disconnected marketing systems and floating spreadsheets that all need to come together in a nice, neat analysis of ROI and business impact.
Finding your ROI can be difficult for any department, but finding the ROI for the overall marketing department is next to impossible if you don’t find a way to connect all of these systems and spreadsheets. According to a 2016 Forrester report entitled, “Discover How Marketing Analytics Increases Business Performance,” marketers who link their metrics to business results are three times more likely to hit revenue goals than those who don’t. You need an analytics platform that can connect to all of these systems for a comprehensive view. Or better yet, have a system that lets you upload those rogue spreadsheets that didn’t quite make the cut in the enterprise system, so you can add them to the mix. Then, and only then, will you be able to attribute marketing revenues across campaigns and channels, and direct investments to the most productive and strategic programs.
With Oracle Analytics Cloud, you can raise the strategic profile of marketing with a complete and connected system, and show clear contribution to business goals and revenue.
This is Part 2 of the Analytics for Marketing Series. We encourage you to please read Part 1.