November 2023MARTECHOUTLOOK.COM8IN MY OPI N IONBy Warren Yancey, Director of Channel Marketing, TransamericaTHE RULES OF MARKETING ANALYTICSKNOW YOUR TARGETS FIRSTYou may be surprised how many marketing teams launched headfirst into a campaign without a clear, unified view of what success looks like. Don't wait until the data has come in to evaluate what good looks like, begin your marketing campaigns by establishing and publishing target benchmarks. Set a pre-existing context for external stakeholders so there are no surprises and misunderstandings of the overall goal. A great starting point is looking at numbers from the previous period or, in the event of a new effort, industry averages from sources like Statista or Hubspot.SANITY CHECK YOUR INSIGHTSUX research has become an increasingly important field in the last several years to ensure companies are in-tune with their customers. Numbers may never lie, but they don't always explain themselves. Directly hearing from customers will yield discoveries and insights that may allow you to tweak your marketing Over the last several years, analytics have provided marketers with a universal language to share findings with outside departments. What was once seen as a creative art can now, at least partially, be distilled to numbers like ROI that any member of sales or operations can immediately interpret. And firms have been quick to invest resources into bolstering their data efforts. From 2017 to 2021, the average spend on marketing data in the U.S. grew from $12.3B to $30.61B and 43 percent of CMOs reported that marketing technology, data, and analytics was their top priority over the next 12 months. Today, almost anything in marketing can be measured, so much so that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction of where it was several decades ago. Today there is too much data to record, let alone analyze. Conversion funnels are more intricate than ever, with disparate platforms coming together as a tech stack where apples-to-apples comparisons become difficult. And data privacy concerns have spurred movements like Google's removal of third-party cookies and Apple's new Mail privacy policy which threaten to obscure accurate results. For many organizations though, having a strong framework for how analytics are used and what data should be prioritized can help ensure number crunching doesn't threaten the amount of time spent on actual marketing.Warren Yancey
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