“CMOs are now clearly accountable for revenue. Marketing teams have gotten much better – especially with the tools and data that are out there – at generating qualified leads and turning them over to sales… But dumping a dump truck full of MQLs is not a solution. And the force from the other side is watching the C-suite and the board of directors talk about revenue in a different way – closes, renewals, upsell.” – Scott Vaughan, CMO at Integrate
Forty-six percent of today’s marketers say proving the ROI of their marketing activities is one of the biggest challenges they face.
It’s Time to Move the Needle on Data
Many marketers are only tracking data such as website traffic, bounce rate and time-on-site from Google Analytics. Some brands may be bringing in engagement data from social marketing. And some may track other silo’d data sets. But a CMO needs to see the entire inbound and outbound picture. The following key data points should be analyzed together to assess your brand’s customer journey: Share of Voice/ social media analytics and demand gen PR efforts; PPC and email campaign results; and MQLs, to name a few.
Not sure how to measure your influencer relations progress? Check out Group High’s blog post, Measure or Die: How to prove the ROI of your influencer marketing programs.
The Power of Integrated Analytics
This is a two-fold approach to gain better insight into your programs. With the digital future just on the horizon, marketers are now finding their customers during critical “micro-moments” which can occur at any time on any channel, and throughout key junctures of the buyer journey. Marketers identify these moments by uncovering trends and behaviors through data. This can be a difficult undertaking, which is why having the right tools and technology is key. Use measurement and analytics practices to become more predictive and ahead of your customers so you no longer have to guess at what resonates during each stage of the buyer journey. By analyzing patterns and high peaks in traffic and engagement, your team will notice trends that will allow your brand to insightfully engage. Your brand will start to hone in on the customer experience and offer valuable content and answers that address customer pain points in real time, setting you apart from your competitors. By analyzing data in the moment, you can optimize your content along the buyer’s journey which will lead to an increased engagement and improved ROI.
Learn more about integrated marketing and PR, read: Defining Your Integrated Marketing & PR Strategy.
The CMO is being held to high expectations for demonstrating marketing & PR ROI and revenue. Measuring the effectiveness of your ongoing programs is essential to keeping these efforts in play. With integrated analytics and the right Martech stack, showcasing your leads, sales and ROI linked to marketing has become more achievable.
Less Talk, More Action: Implementing the Right Approach
The key to effective implementation of integrated analytics comes down to a few factors:
- Skill set is a must. Seek the right team to execute: It’s hard to prove ROI on any new marketing purchase without effective implementation into your strategy or proper knowledge or training. Be sure you align the teams’ skill set at point of setup so you are ahead of the game with optimization or reporting. Be sure to lean on your agency partners as well – they may have a blended platform that integrates seamlessly with your approach.
- Choose the right marketing technology stack: It’s extremely difficult to approach holistic marketing and PR without essential tools to plan, execute and measure what’s happening within your programs. In fact, sophisticated marketers who deploy a complete marketing stack of five or more tools are 39% more likely to see improvement in the overall performance of their marketing programs. – Google Analytics Solutions and Forrester. Your stack will vary depending on your program needs, team size and budget restrictions. However, having the right tools that integrate and share data is strongly recommended.
- Avoid getting lost in the “data jungle”: No CMO has the time to sort through mountains of data, which is why you have successfully pulled together the right marketing stack with the right team in place to report integrated data. Now it’s time for your team to capture those micro-moments while you present essential findings to the CEO and C-suite. As Scott Vaughan noted in a recent interview, C-suites need to understand and grasp this information in a different context. Our firm developed ‘PANOptic’. This report combines quantitative and qualitative analysis, matched with data-driven insights, key observations and specific recommendations, delivered in real time so you can see the impact of your campaigns. Clear data trends and campaign optimization recommendations provide strategic guidance for your marketing team.
Further supporting the changing conversation around relaying data, measurement and analysis, we sat down with Scott Vaughan, CMO at Integrate. Sharing the entire picture with your organization is just as important as sifting through the data to find conclusions. If you don’t have the rest of your C-suites on board with what you’re trying to accomplish, then it’s a missed opportunity as an organization.
“…you need to build a predictable, scalable model that works, that has some agility to it, and that’s constantly being optimized. That’s where a conversation starts. But there is education about really touting the full customer lifecycle and talk about both the revenue opportunity, renewal retention, lifetime value – these key KPIs and indicators are so important to give the full picture. That does start with a lot of education and making sure that you have your own playbook and dashboard in order. I think you earn a lot more credibility by showing that full process.” – Scott Vaughan, CMO at Integrate
At the end of the day, your team needs data-driven insight into your customer and audience behaviors. The right use of measurement and analytics will help you create intelligent content that will help you effectively grow your business to become that idealized brand with which people truly connect.
Looking for more from the CMO Pitfall series? Make sure you check out ‘CMO Pitfall: What are the 3 Factors that Drive Success?’ or ‘CMO Pitfall: How to Crank Up Your Personalized Content’.
Let’s continue the conversation @MarkCNardone.