Not any insights will do: time to reframe the data discussion
The rise of big data and its effect on business innovation and growth is undeniable. In fact, data lies at the heart of most marketer's decisions, but it can be difficult to know which insights can be most important for meeting brand objectives and ensuring that internal communications match a brand's real messaging.
The Drum x Datorama 'Not just any insights will do: Reframe the data discussion' DrumCast
Understanding data performance can help marketers to work out a campaign’s success and to contribute to marketers finding out whether there’s any scope for uncovering new opportunities.
During a recent The Drum webcast, in partnership with Datorama, two industry experts shared their insights to help data driven marketers navigate the complex system with new data sources, areas of measurement, reporting and insights.
The participants included Julie Norman, senior product marketing manager, Datorama; and Stuart Arrowsmith, head of data, Croud.
Norman noted that in 2011, there were just a couple of hundred adtech and martech solutions in the market while today there are over 7000.
Why should we care?
“Our role within Salesforce Marketing Cloud is to bring in and automate data from those platforms as well as google, Facebook and Instagram and other tech solutions and walled gardens to create a unified single source of truth for marketers.
“The reason automation of this process is so important is because marketers today work within a very complex environment where they’re often having to navigate multiple regions or business units or managing product lines. Also they’re constantly having to hit various goals, from sales targets, conversions, brand awareness, to driving trials, brand loyalty, etc,” says Norman.
For Arrowsmith, it all needs to start with asking the right question. “What is crucial at the moment is that we really analyse what we're doing for example the process of data visualisation - and ask ourselves why? Or what is it that we are doing?” How to translate that into data and finally how to turn those data generated insights into engaging dashboards that are bespoke for your end user?”
Obviously with more than 7,000 martech vendors, digital marketers need to understand better how their various campaigns and programmes work to help and make the right marketing investments.
They both agreed that it’s a data strategy that really underpins everything, as a marketing dashboard is only as useful as the data and the insights behind it.
Data into actionable insights
The big question however remains what do we do with those insights?
All marketers are now accountable for driving the business forward, whether that’s measured by top-line sales, conversions, or category share. The most impactful marketers are using data, insights and performance results to drive their decisions and strategies.
But the reality is that performance and audience data live in silos, which limits full picture visibility. This makes analysing complete campaign impact and spend performance difficult.
Both Norman and Arrowsmith explained that marketing intelligence systems, such as Datorama, doesn’t just automate the time-intensive, complex reporting processes but also give marketers the option to drill into campaigns to understand growth drivers, ROIs, engagement, or channel performance. With this degree of insight, brands can become more efficient when it comes to hitting their marketing objectives.
These points and many further insights can be divulged in the video above.