Month: June 2020

Your marketing budget is at risk.  

The news keeps getting worse. Businesses are closed, the economy is compromised, the supply chain is fractured, unemployment rates are skyrocketing.

It’s terrible news, and it’s directly affecting your business – your livelihood – as much as it is affecting your life. 

As a marketing agency owner, that’s you. As an agency director or executor, that’s you, too. As a marketing director in a corporate environment … yep, that’s you. 

Jobs are at risk. Projects are on hold. Budgets are slashed. This is the reality for many in the marketing and advertising industry.  

Executives in every industry are grappling with their own unique challenges. Many, if not most, of them are trying to find ways to preserve their cash flow as much as they can. If they are good at what they do – and they generally aren’t where they are if they aren’t good at what they do – they are exhausting every possible option for extending their runway during times like these. Federal help, state help, municipal help, overhead cuts, vendor breaks, subscription pauses, layoffs, furloughs, insurance … and on and on and on.  

Your budget is on that list. It’s on that list about three different times.  

But, as a marketer, you understand the importance of marketing and communications during a time like this. You understand that an organization’s reputation hinges on how that communication is handled. A significant cut in your budget will cause your brand to lose footing in the consumer’s mind and will jeopardize the success of reopening.   

To preserve your budget, you must reach the executive where he/she is. Speak their language – the cash flow, the leads, the opportunities, the forecasts. A good executive might invest where there is a good opportunity for revenue. But a good executive will invest where there is a good forecast for revenue. 

Data will result in the forecast. Forecasting authoritatively will result in the budget.  Tell an executive what they can expect if they invest. Be precise. Use data. 

Here are three ways you can communicate with executives and retain your marketing budget: 

1. Don’t be generic. Don’t dance around the challenges. Be specific with your goals.  

With data, you are empowering the executive to make a wise investment. You aren’t convincing them with your great personality and influence. The data can do the talking. Historical data leads to analytical forecasts. Analytical forecasts will lead to investment, even in uncertain times.  

2. Show the data that led to the KPIs. Be specific about the numbers. 

A plan with data puts the power in the hands of the decision-maker. You want to provide the executive with that power. But none of that can happen without a strategy behind your data storytelling. You must connect the right data sources. You must look at the trends and the correlations. You must make scientific forecasts. 

3. Explain how you can reach the results. Be specific with what the executive can expect to see. You are the expert. 

A smart executive will invest in a marketing plan that includes KPIs, specific goals, and a reasoned approach to expected results. That doesn’t happen without a measurement strategy with historical data. And that doesn’t happen without data analysts to help you.  

Specificity is key with all these tips. When you are specific, the decision for appropriate investment becomes clear for the executive. 

That’s how you can keep your marketing budget. Need more support? That’s where OROS Analytics comes in. Whether it’s helping you determine a better measurement strategy, designing your marketing to be more measurable, or providing full-scale analytics solutions, we would love to help.

Marketers usually have one thing in common – they are looking to preserve and defend their marketing budgets. Implementing a marketing measurement strategy and analytics solution that is sustainable, and offers actionable insights, is critical to achieving this goal.  Available solutions in the marketplace range from plug-and-play tools that require the end-users to manage their own inputs and outputs to full-service intelligence firms (like OROS Analytics) that offer a user-friendly tool, in-depth insights and technical expertise in technology and marketing to impact your strategy.   

Budgeting Will Always Be Data Driven

According to the CMO Spend Survey 2019 – 2020 executed by Gartner, “CMOs have staked their claim that competitive insights and analytics are the two most important capabilities supporting the delivery of their marketing strategies over the next 18 months” (Gartner, 2019 – gain access to the full survey). That same survey indicated that 76% of marketing decisions are data-driven and that on average 16% of a company’s overall marketing budget is being ear-marked for data and analytics solutions.

Not All Tools (or Marketing Analysts) are Created Equal

Plug-and-play solutions appear to be the cheaper route in terms of tool investments at first glance, but don’t forget that you’ll still have to invest in an employee to manage that tool.  Some companies are going all in on their investment in marketing analytics and bringing data scientists in house. Glass Door indicates that an investment in an in-house data scientist could range between $83K and $154K annually depending on what part of the country you are in (and don’t forget that their salary does not include the additional investment that will still need to be made in the tools that those scientists are using). And if the tools they are using aren’t allowing them to layer information in a way that is actionable and meaningful – you can chalk your entire investment up to money-well-wasted. In the long run, this solution could cost you double what investing in a partnership with a firm like OROS would cost.  

Plug-and-play solutions also present challenges in terms of layering data and data inclusivity.  If an API connection doesn’t exist, the plug-and-play model immediately falls apart through limitations on what data can be included in your dashboard. These tools are ostracizing measurement strategies meant to include traditional marketing efforts through an emphasis on digital-only channels. These tools also fail to overcome the pain point of layering data. The plug-and-play solutions might help to get all of your data into one dashboard, but that data still exists in independent silos and doesn’t show how one set of data is influencing other data points. The bottom line is this: Tools can help – but they don’t replace the value of real humans, that understand marketing, rolling up their sleeves and getting to know your business.  

Relying on data to make strategic decisions sounds smart, but it can be dangerous if your marketing measurement strategy isn’t thoughtful, all-inclusive and delivered in a tool capable of layering to understand attribution and a true correlation between your marketing efforts and the results that those efforts are driving.  A single dashboard where all of your data exists is one thing – a custom dashboard that shows attribution and the correlation between your ad spend, revenue generation and overall brand health/engagement is another.

What To Consider When Choosing a Marketing Analytics Solution

Here are some things to consider when investigating marketing analytics solutions. If you want someone to walk through these questions with you, let us know. We’d love to help.  

• Do you have a documented measurement strategy that coincides with your existing marketing calendar and company-wide objectives and KPIs?
• What does your current reporting look like?
  • Is your team manually creating reports in Excel and Powerpoint, and if so, how many hours a month are they spending building these reports?  
  • Where do your reports live? Are you able to access one report that tells you everything you need to know or are you accessing multiple reports across various platforms, file types and dashboards?  
  • Are you regularly reporting the performance of your marketing efforts and is your method for doing so sustainable long term? (think employee bandwidth, knowledge of various platforms, knowledge of marketing strategy and tool capabilities).   
  • Do you have a team with a technical background that can effectively manage API connections and data dumps? 
  • Are you able to visualize marketing and business data together in a meaningful way? 
• What systems, efforts and platforms are you using that you could be layering data from?  
  • Platforms to consider:  
    • Google Analytics 
    • Social media platforms 
    • Digital ad platforms 
    • SEO 
    • SEM 
    • Email marketing tools 
    • CRM 
    • Point-of-sale system 
    • Traditional media efforts (tv, billboards, print) 
    • Other proprietary platforms 
• What data do you wish you could start collecting? Would it be helpful to have a partner that can talk through best practices for data collection?  
• Do your analysts understand marketing attribution theory and how it applies to your marketing strategy?   
• Are you currently able to retrieve data from APIs with ease?  
• Can you easily filter your current reports, and would the following filter types be useful to you?  
  • Date range 
  • Promotion type 
  • Platform 
  • Revenue source 

Consider how you responded to each of the questions in the list above. Maybe the best solution for your organization is evident.

If you’re not sure where to get started or what solution type is best for you, let us help. We would love to set up a consultation to learn more about your existing measurement strategy, talk you through our process and offer some solicited advice.