Member Article

The entire C-suite should be sitting up and listening

All too often, marketing exists in a vacuum. It can seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy of more clicks and more views, leaving the rest of the company in the dark about who their customers are and what they want.

But this status quo is crying out for an update. Think of the value marketers’ knowledge could be to your sales and R&D departments, for starters. Then think of what would happen if it was shared across the whole company and used to hone in on what really works. In the industry of today, data-led insights are of immense value to everyone across the board. And after all, sharing is caring.

From the marketing vacuum…

Sure, marketing was once a black box, and it used to be impossible to connect the dots across different campaigns on different platforms. But you used to have to find a phone box to make a phone call, too. Things change.

Now, we have the data and technology to empirically prove the ROI of marketing efforts on a granular level. It can indisputably show marketing’s impact on the bottom line of the entire company. It goes by the name of marketing intelligence.

What marketing intelligence shows about consumers is of huge value to everyone in a business – and the entire C-suite should be sitting up and listening. One study found that almost all (93%) of 152 US and UK brand marketers surveyed agree that data science and analytics are important to their business. So why isn’t everyone doing it?

… To the revenue driver

According to 43% of the same respondents, the costs of data science are prohibitive, as is the lack of measures of actual business impact, such as sales or growth. But this means businesses are caught in a catch-22. The lack of proof that marketing is moving the needle means businesses aren’t investing in the technology that will do just that: move the needle.

There is one simple solution to this impasse, and that’s making sure the marketing department is working towards the same goals as the business as a whole. By choosing to measure sales and growth rather than CTRs and CPVs, marketers can justify their investments, prove their worth, and ensure their efforts benefit the company as a whole.

Make marketing work for everyone

The costliness of going in-house can also be avoided. By partnering with a third-party, marketers can fully realise the value of marketing intelligence in a way that drives growth and sales, without breaking the bank. You don’t need your own data infrastructure or expertise, and you can benefit from external data assets which complement and strengthen the company’s proprietary ones.

With this kind of arsenal at their fingertips, marketers can be growth-drivers who sit at the strategic heart of the business and power wider business decisions. For example, one Tourism Whistler campaign helped the brand unearth their best performing demographic (females in the 35–44 age group) – which is the kind of information which is invaluable to the business as a whole, as it plans its future moves.

But marketing intelligence goes above and beyond finding a brand’s ideal customer. A financial services business found that by segmenting their customers using marketing intelligence that they could increase their ROI by an impressive ratio of 39:1. Now that’s hardly the kind of result that only the marketing department would be pleased with.

Data, and the human intelligence to interpret it, is no longer the preserve of the marketing department. Marketing intelligence can drive meaningful results and unearth crucial insights for the wider company and help plot its future. So it’s high time that it is seen as a revenue-driver, not as something that exists in a marketing-vacuum. It’s far from a dead weight – it’s a secret weapon.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Giles Ivey, MiQ .