Analytics

In God We Trust

All Others Bring Data

Modern Marketing is a "two-hemisphere" brain activity. As the separation between Marketing and IT disappeared, so too much of the separation between Marketing and Finance disappeared. For decades, one of the biggest challenges a marketer contended with was obtaining buy-in for their right-brain activities from the "skeptical" left-brain, and data-owning, CFO.   

Today, the challenge still exists to a degree. Fortunately, though, the enormous amount of data being generated by consumers shifts the statistical planning, discovery, interpretation, and communication of data directly into the ownership of the Marketing department. If the ownership of consumer and marketing data does not live in the Marketing department, there will be continuous headaches, failures, and potential employee turnover. 

While a modern marketer still needs to communicate and account for their actions with fact-based data, the ownership, discovery, and interpretation of consumer-related data is now 100% a marketing function.

Wikipedia does a good job defining and describing analytics for our purposes. "Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns towards effective decision making. In other words, analytics is the connective tissue between data and effective decision making within an organization." I like that description of analytics being the connective tissue, so true.

So as the newly equipped modern marketer sits at the wheel of their CNS jarring yet luxuriously-tuned martech system, all of that data waiting at their fingertips has one almighty purpose, to optimize! 

Everything a modern marketer manages has roots in a continually evolving benchmark measured against a never-ending battery of multivariate testing. The optimization and automation that data provides marketers with today allows them to instantly measure KPIs, attribution, customer experience, demographics, behavioral actions, customer segmentation, predictive modeling, media mix management, pricing and promotional strategies, PHEW! I’m sure I missed a few.

Twenty years ago when I shifted my full time focus to marketing, we only dreamed of what technology could do for us. Today those dreams we exceeded more than a decade ago. It’s time to peal back the blinders, grab hold of your data, and leave your competition in the marketing dust, or not, but do you want to take that risk?