As marketers face increasing pressure to improve performance and make data-driven decisions, they’re running up against recurring obstacles as they try to gain a better understanding of their business. With marketers trying to get a better grip on their data, one of the most common challenges they face revolves around aggregating and integrating data across different channel-specific marketing systems.
The evolution of media channels and data sources
Before the advent of the internet, the advertising landscape was easier to understand. Marketers had fewer media channels to engage with, measurement was extrapolated via panel data and while systems were siloed, it didn’t matter as much because identity couldn’t be established. Of course everything changed with the rise of the internet.
Now, marketers have exponentially more media channels, impact can be measured at the individual user level, and siloed data systems have gone from a minor industry nuisance to a major competitive disadvantage.
Examples of media channels in the pre-digital and digital age
| Examples of media and data sources | |
| Pre-digital era | Digital era |
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With the non-standardized complexity of data systems, marketers are having a hard time making sense of data sources and media channels to formulate a comprehensive view of their teams performance. According to Accenture, two of the top three customer data challenges marketers are facing are related to data aggregation and data quality. And only 24% of advertisers believe their third-party/partner data is very accurate. Additionally, only 29% consider their measurement data completely trustworthy (source).
The Marketer’s Dilemma
With such a low level of confidence, marketers have taken matters into their own hands to wrangle their data and learn how to make more effective decisions on media spend. We’ve seen marketers use a combination of spreadsheets (e.g. Excel), teams of analysts, and generic data warehouses to overcome these challenges. Periodic reports are generated and used to provide a snapshot of campaign performance for decision-making. However, despite marketers best efforts, most existing solutions are either unreliable, incomplete in their data collection, static in their reporting or, at times, full of errors.
What’s needed is a true marketing intelligence software solution that’s adaptable, scalable, designed to facilitate marketers decision-making, and fuel their growth in the digital advertising space. Marketers need a solution that will automatically aggregate all data sources, normalize them, and store event-level data to offer a dynamic view of the complete customer journey — all the while delivering actionable insights in real time. The bottom line: Marketers should be looking for a technology partner that delivers a clear and nuanced understanding of their data.
The Solution
At impact.com, that solution is Media Manager. Based on experience with our clients, the benefits are clear. Marketers will see for the first time, in real time, their customers comprehensive journey, as well as a view of how it affects their business. They’ll be able to identify correlations across different data sources and their impact on revenue. Then, they can map out performance gaps and align with internal cross-channel stakeholders and external ones, to arrive at the best course of action.
By making decisions based on these insights, marketers can minimize their exposure to unnecessary risks and drive performance improvements for both the marketing department and the business as a whole.
About Media Manager
Media Manager is a marketing intelligence platform that centralizes all your data in real time to help establish causality between spend and results. It empowers you and your team to make rational, data-driven decisions that optimize toward your KPIs. Media Manager does all the heavy lifting of consolidation and modeling — displaying cross-channel attribution metrics, consumer journey analytics, and unified marketing impact analytics in visual dashboards so you can have time to focus on identifying insights that optimize your marketing.
With industry-leading cross-device capabilities, you can have confidence that your data is reliable and tells the true story of the customer journey. Media Manager is the only tool of its kind truly built to serve as your marketing system of record and the compass you need to boost your KPIs.
