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As a marketing executive, you can track the performance of pretty much everything you do. But data alone won’t give you the information you need to be a successful and effective data-driven marketing organization. Great marketing results start with having great data. That’s why you must have data you can count on to be able to make high-impact marketing decisions.
Becoming data-driven requires a 360-degree view of your marketing organization. A lot of pieces need to be aligned within a company first to then successfully take on a MarTech solution which results in capturing data you can count on to make insightful marketing decisions.
Here are three key ways to generate great data:
Establish data governance and quality.
As part of MSIGHTS’ roadmap to successful data implementation, we help clients establish data governance and quality through these three steps:
- Creating global standards and processes.
- Promoting standards as necessary.
- Building in monitoring processes to ensure compliance and accountability.
Planning out specifications, such as document naming conventions and taxonomy, tags, and data hierarchy will generate consistent and reliable results. In turn, that will lead to having effective data that can drive high-impact marketing decisions.
As a leader, you will need to get buy-in from all team members and get them on board for this push to establish data governance, especially if you’ve never set and enforced standards in the past. This task will save confusion and inconsistencies in data gathering.
Plan for ongoing quality data.
If your goal is to become a more effective data-driven marketing organization, then you will need to operationalize data management, including developing a maintenance plan and reporting approach that are tailored to your specific business needs. Doing so will ensure that your data moving forward will have the value and reliability needed for future analysis.
Part of developing your approach requires planning the 4 C’s of data reporting and analysis:
Cadence: Determine reporting and analysis frequency.
Cuts: Create different analysis/report views.
Cleanliness: Clean, organized data delivers better reports.
Communication: Open dialogue with stakeholders and agencies.
Mapping out those 4 C’s means asking the following questions:
- What reporting frequency will you need?
- Which analytical views will bring value to your organization?
- How will your data be cleansed and organized to ensure quality reports?
- How will you maintain open dialog and clear contractual expectations with all stakeholders?
Creating a standard will produce quality data results for future analysis and decision making. Implementing a comprehensive operational and maintenance plan—from collection to cleansing to reporting—helps ensure ongoing quality data.
Stay focused.
As we mentioned in our previous post, becoming an effective data-driven marketing organization means being willing to play the long game. The transition is no quick fix, so as you move through this process, keep in mind these key takeaways:
- It’s not a project. It’s go-forward operations.
- Focus on small wins. They drive momentum.
- Communicate and evangelize, but don’t hype.
Remember, when all pieces and people are in place, you activate the data to use it effectively and efficiently to empower marketing decisions.
Success can be evaluated by direct measurements like the impact on marketing ROI. But there are also important indirect measurements, such as faster access to better information to make better decisions, more direct access to information, accelerating results, and learning to optimize plans and products while in the market. This process supports continued success because all results are stored for future reference and key learnings.
Over 16 years of working with many different clients, different data, unique data challenges within companies all from various countries, regions, languages in the B2B and B2C markets, and in different verticals, we have taken what we have learned and developed our roadmap to operationalizing data-driven marketing. Every time we onboard a client, we follow this roadmap to pave the way to successfully implementing a MarTech solution that will support marketing and business efforts.
If you’d like more information on our roadmap and how it can help your organization download our full MSIGHTS Data Implementation Guide right below.
