In today’s market, organisations worldwide are under increasing pressure to work as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, with departments looking for ways to “trim the fat”. A key example of this is the growing need for marketing accountability, with the broader business expecting to see the return on investment from campaigns and activities.
With the growing number of platforms and channels accessible to marketers, measuring ROI can be tricky to track. So what’s the solution? Simple answer: data analytics.
The past year has reinforced the role of data as an essential and disruptive driver of business decision making. In particular, for marketers to stay competitive data analytics cannot be ignored as a key tool for insights and smart decision-making.
Why? Because data analytics offers levels of transparency and insight on campaigns and activities previously left to “finger in the air” assessments – which we’ve all been guilty of. With research revealing 72% of marketers consider data analysis and management to be the most important skillset for their business to acquire in the next two years, it’s encouraging to see that marketers not only understand the benefits of data analytics, but are one of the strongest advocates in business today.
One business that successfully leveraged data analytics is global media agency Mindshare. For one client specifically, they struggled to see how advertising spend translated into profit.
By combining several data sources – including the client’s website traffic, media and call centre activity – and visualising this data in a dashboard for analysis, Mindshare connected its client’s TV ads with spikes in website traffic and calls into the call centre. The insights gained were a real “aha!” moment for the client, giving them a comprehensive way of understanding what the customer journey looked like and how best to reach them.
Another example is Spil Games. With over 100 million monthly users, the mobile game company wanted to improve the user experience. However, they struggled to analyse the masses of data stored in multiple sources across the company. By using data analytics to monitor how users navigate their gaming portal, Spil Games quickly identified non-performing marketing campaigns, helping them to achieve a 500% ROI from its search engine advertising spend.
With data at the core, conversations go from “what happened?” to more strategic questions of “why” and “how”. The ability to analyse marketing data, gain valuable insights, and then share and respond to those insights quickly is crucial to identifying new opportunities or pivoting current plans.
Susan Graeme is senior director of EMEA marketing at Tableau Software
