STUFF FOR
HUMANS
Why we started OROS
“We’re cutting your marketing budget because times are tough, and we have to cut costs.”
-EVERY CFO EVER
So, we started a marketing analytics and intelligence company and you might be asking why. Chiefmartech.com tracks almost 7,000 marketing technology companies and there’s a decent-sized list of data and attribution companies within the portfolio. But hear us out, because we think we’ve built something special.
Marketers have a positioning problem. We’ve spent late nights and early mornings pushing product, fighting for clicks, and slashing unsubscribe rates. We care about our products, and we believe that we’re making a difference. Our companies grow when we’re doing our best work. We know exactly who our customers are and what they want. We read blogs and listen to podcasts. We do our best to stay current with the latest trends.
In our effort to be the best marketers we could be, we completely overlooked the most important initiative in all of marketing… showing our value. As ironic as it is, we’ve ignored one of marketing’s sacred four Ps, and we find ourselves fighting just to keep our budgets flat. Marketing is viewed as a cost. A luxury of business which can be pulled at the first sign of a bad day on the Dow.
But marketing isn’t a cost. It’s an investment. We spend money, results go up. We test to see what works and results go even higher. So, why do marketers struggle with the positioning of our value? Again, there are a lot of marketing analytics companies out there. We’ve tried them. We’ve entered our credit card number into those same 14-day trial agreements that you have. The problem is complex to solve, but easy to identify. Marketing intelligence has a lack of technology getting to the root of the problem, which leads to lost time and efficiency for humans to actually use the data to make data-driven decisions.
We’re marketers, too. In our past lives, we ran our social media reports out of one of those great tools that let you publish, report, and monitor all in one fell swoop. We generated our email reports out of whichever ESP we were using, and we compiled it all with some Google Analytics and Google Ads dashboards. We took the spreadsheets from our paid media publishers, and we grabbed a .CSV from our POS or sales team to bookend the report. Before we knew it, we had 48-page reports with all sorts of disjointed metrics that were actually all interdependent, but the report didn’t show it. You know how this story ends. The data was too generic, and there was too much. What data was consumed by the end-user turned into a list of questions about the data itself, not the marketing story and ecosystem.
So, then we took a different approach. We started getting great metrics into Excel. Only the stuff we needed. But, we were spending 90% of our reporting time building reports and 10% analyzing them. Reports became a huge burden that was checked off our lists and then we moved on. No insights. No recommendations. No value shown to the people who cut our checks. What’s worse, we were only doing the “good” hand-built reports for our biggest budgets because they were so time-consuming. We were leaving other marketing programs with that big 48-pager.
So we started OROS.
Because of our experiences, we know marketing analysis needs a human-centric approach to declutter data and make marketing analytics more approachable and full of impact. That’s what’s missing in the marketing data space. With most analytics products, you put your card in and never work with anyone unless you have a support ticket. You need a partner because you need to create customized reports that are different for each of your stakeholders. Your CEO’s marketing report should be different than the reports your strategy team uses to review, adjust and plan your marketing efforts.
You need to see your paid Facebook impressions and your paid search impressions all on one trended line with revenue by day layered on top. You need to see not just how your channels impacted your website, but also how different messages drove success. You need reports showing how your campaigns are running, refreshing with new data so that your team can adjust strategy in real-time instead of waiting until after all that money was spent. You need all of your data filtered to show only the important metrics that are tied to your business drivers. Your reports should tell a story, with clarity, about how your marketing is growing your business. They should serve as a road map showing where you were and where you’re going.
It takes humans who understand marketing and how to get your data centralized and visualized in one place. Our engineering and technology team members are former marketers.
It takes humans to write your measurement strategy that fits hand-in-glove with your marketing strategy. It takes people who can show you how to track your marketing efforts and make sure they’re tied together (which has to happen before your marketing efforts go out the door). Our data collection team understands how marketing channels are intertwined.
It takes humans who understand how to interpret and analyze data, derive intelligence and help forecast your predictive results after changes are made. Our insights team is built on marketing principles. Simply, it takes more than an out of the box solution. Built for marketers, by marketers, we’re a human-centric approach to data unification and visualization because you have to show your value.
