Data-Driven Techniques Transform Marketing into an Analytics-Ready Organization

Marketing Relevance Rises with Business Intelligence and Big Data

By Sam Somashekar, Senior Product Management / Marketing / Strategy Consultant

Photo credit: Carlos Veira Lorenzo

There once was a time when the typical marketing strategy was “if you throw enough against the wall, eventually something will stick.” Marketing budgets were huge, and the volume and size of campaigns were even larger. Not all of them were successful at generating qualified leads and ultimately deals; however, when you’re not tracking those metrics, you’re not observant of failure. But marketing budgets are not limitless anymore and marketing teams must make every dollar count.

Today, there are lots of tools to increase visibility into marketing strategies and their effectiveness. CRM software can capture lead sources and track them through to opportunities and wins/losses. Website visits and downloads can be tracked by the millions, allowing companies to see the exact paths visitors take online. Customer sentiments are also traceable — including where they voice them and what they say, whether positive or negative. Marketers have more powerful methods to segment their target audience and focus specific content and programs towards that audience.

Marketing Automation Tool with Website Tracking

Despite these capabilities, marketing departments typically do not have the application development or business intelligence (BI) skills necessary to take advantage of all this data. As a result, failed marketing efforts become more apparent without the ability to clearly identify why they failed. But it does not have to be this way. By leveraging the expertise and offerings from big data and analytics services providers, you can put in place a process to systematically monitor, measure, and react to big data insights. This will allow you to gain critical visibility into your prospects and customers, offer them targeted marketing programs, and help drive revenue.

For example, some of our senior consultants at Chateaux are currently working on a project for a large printing and imaging company to help them gain better visibility into sales and marketing data from a variety of legacy and online data sources. Their goal is to increase the speed of data analysis and identification of new opportunities. In addition to deploying customized BI solutions and providing BI expertise, we are also helping them build a roadmap for an Analytics Ready Organization. This includes understanding the dynamics of the organization and current BI skillsets, identifying critical BI roles and responsibilities, and building an actionable plan that will enable BI usage to evolve and grow.

Investing in the right BI tools, Big Data, and organizational readiness will enable your marketing teams to have a more measurable impact on your business and will keep you ahead of global competitors.