Are You Achieving Agile Marketing That Continuously Optimizes?

According to McKinsey, “Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.” How often […]

Jaime Singson
Jaime Singson
Senior Director of Product and Content Marketing Manager

According to McKinsey, “Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.”

How often do you consolidate and reconcile the various reports from the many different silos within your marketing organization? How long does it take you and your team to perform this often time-consuming, tedious task? And what about human errors—tasks completed by hand are often riddled with data quality issues. A marketing System of Record (SoR) can help alleviate all these challenges so your marketing insights can be more agile, providing you with continuous optimization so you get the best results from your campaigns.

Marketing reporting is like herding cats.

Most organizations consolidate siloed marketing reports quarterly or at the end of an integrated campaign as a post-mortem analysis. Why so infrequently? Consolidation and reconciliation of data is a labor-intensive task gathering info  from different vendors with different measurement systems. As soon as you have two reports aligned, another one comes along with an entirely different way of looking at results, which requires in-depth marketing analysis. A marketing SoR fixes this by automatically translating the calculations from various reports into one comprehensive account.

For quality results, marketing reporting should trace the full customer journey.

For your reports to be meaningful, data needs to do more than just a consolidation of data—it needs to be people-based, and not device-based nor single channel-based. Once your reports reveal the actions taken by individuals in response to your marketing, you gain a fuller understanding of their journey to purchase, which you can use to keep honing your campaigns along the way and to inform future campaigns. People-based marketing reports are vital to providing reliable insights into your campaigns.

Marketing hindsight is 20/20—but what about during the campaign?

For some organizations, quarterly channel performance reviews are the best they can do. But for modern, agile departments, a quarterly cadence isn’t good enough—they need insights as the campaign unfolds, so programs can be optimized and improved along the way, which an SoR provides. Think about how useful channel managers would find marketing analytics if they could actually use the findings to adjust their campaigns while in-flight. Relying on quarterly or end-of-campaign reviews doesn’t allow marketers to reach their full potential—an agile marketing approach is much more likely to help make campaigns successful.  

An SoR and organizational alignment: A two-pronged solution

To achieve agile, continuous optimization takes a two-pronged approach. First, you need to upgrade your tools with an SoR (system of records). An SoR makes the ingestion and cleansing of omni-channel data, calculation of KPIs, and delivery of omni-channel performance reports automated and in real-time. Your conversion data is deduped and reconciled, so the correct channel gets credit for its contribution, i.e., paid search and display do not get credit for the same conversion.

Second, you need organizational alignment. Unified marketing data is only good if the marketing department is optimally structured to take advantage of it. The data in the survey below depicts exactly how important marketing realignment is in order to better leverage marketing technologies such as an SoR. Some 73% of marketing leaders have restructured or plan to restructure their organizations in the coming year, providing an excellent opportunity to optimize for success on all fronts.

Achieving marketing success requires a multifaceted, informed approach. For more insights into how a system of record or SoR improves your marketing, download our eBook, Four Ways You Win with a Marketing System of Record. 

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