According to the CMO Council™ Marketing Outlook 2007, quantifying and measuring the value of marketing programs is the top challenge facing marketers in 2007. To quantify marketing performance, many of those surveyed (43.8 percent) are looking to implement automated marketing dashboards.
Building the dashboard is the simple part, automating the data feeds to deliver timely and accurate marketing insight is the challenge. Let’s assume you are a marketer who spends over $25 million on marketing annually and people can buy your product via retail, web or telesales channels. If you have a $25 million budget, then you are using multiple marketing channels – direct mail, direct response/alt media, interactive, mass media, sponsorships, etc, which also means you have multiple agencies, media plans and data sources.
The performance dashboard that seemed simple initially suddenly looks a bit more complex, we call this the “Marketing Iceberg Effect”. As the below iceberg illustration demonstrates, what is above the water looks manageable but when you look below the surface, you have a new appreciation and understanding of what is supporting the portion that is above the water, in this case models, reports and dashboards. Building the report or dashboard is the easy part, getting the right data from the numerous internal and external sources and standardizing processes so you can measure marketing is the true challenge.
Automating the data to get to the desired marketing dashboard is not insurmountable. To overcome the data challenge and to jump-start your marketing intelligence initiatives, I would recommend leveraging a three step program designed to identify and evaluate business issues, opportunities, data, resources and processes that are the foundation for implementing a marketing dashboard.
- Business Assessment: What do want?
- Define and develop an understanding of the business issues/opportunities
- Baseline of associated metrics relevant to sustaining a business case
- Determine if MI can impact business ROI
- Data Assessment: What do you have?
- Inventory and audit relevant data sources, data collection processes and data attributes to define data gaps and a path for assembling data to meet business needs
- Recommendations: How do you get there?
- Build on the insight gained from previous stages to present tactical recommendations along with supporting business cases on how MI can drive marketing decisioning
If you follow this approach, you should be able to navigate to a marketing dashboard that will meet your organizations needs.
Commercial
If you need help getting started, we developed the Marketing Intelligence Readiness Assessment: a low-risk, rapid identification and evaluation of business issues, opportunities, data, resources and processes that builds the marketing intelligence business case for organizations. For more information, download our Marketing Intelligence Readiness Assessment brochure or contact our sales group sales@upperquadrant.com or 703-476-1993.
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