Sure You Can Market But Can You Measure Everything and Report Back?

A Webinar in May sponsored by Forbes Insights addressed how top marketers are using online data analytics (for example, IBM’s “coremetrics”) to navigate these changing times.

The after-Webinar Q&A with panelists Yuchun Lee and Christiaan Rizy disclosed the panelists endorsement of two marketing essentials: measurability and reportability.

Q. Is database decision-making adversely affecting marketing?

A. Data and results have always ultimately driven marketing; and, yes, ROI surrounding customer acquisition, retention, and marketability is primarily a numbers priority. But todays’ data-driven marketing is not equivalent to black box marketing, where you set it and forget it. Forward-thinking marketers are adopting a suite of marketing technologies that can collect, measure and evaluate all marketing channels. This suite can look at customer service behavior, social media, behavior, email, advertising, affiliate channels, display advertising – the whole operation. Those who adopt this comprehensive approach are on the cutting-edge. Survey results of top marketers show adopters of comprehensive measurement also are three times as likely to review campaign results in real time and four times as likely to adjust the campaign in real time.

Q How does a new company decide how to invest marketing dollars?

A. You’ll always need to do brand marketing. The point is to make sure you’re measuring the success of your brand marketing and awareness-raising activities, too. As you collect and measure behavior data, you can fine-tune the branding effort as well.

While, measurement is key to instilling a data-driven structure, it’s just as important to present information that’s easily consumable by upper levels of management. For instance, tools like dashboards, exportable Excel based documents, and so on ensure that data from the analysts is always accessible by the decision-makers.

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