I’ve seen enough reporting and sat in many meetings to know that there is a massive frustration from marketing managers to understand the “so what” when it comes to campaign reporting.
Here are three of the biggest problems in data-driven marketing that Measurebyte is working hard to solve:
Problem #1 - paid, owned and earned media silos
Reporting silos have unintentionally been created across paid, owned and earned media because each is generally managed by a separate partner agency. All of which are 'marking their own work'... Rightly or wrongly... This could be a PR company, which is reporting on reach, engagement and AVE. Then you have paid media reporting on performance metrics like CPM and CTR and then finally, perhaps you have the SEO team reporting on keyword rankings. The siloed / isolated reports do not make sense when trying to figure out how to grow your brand… It creates frustration when trying to go through the various reports and their metrics to answer the "so what" accurately.
Problem #2 - incorrect taxonomy
We have further tensions from marketing managers when paid media teams are briefed on campaigns that need to serve both awareness and acquisition (as an example). The tension arises when the same metrics are used to report on both campaigns. One then wonders why video "did not work", maybe it's because it was positioned to drive leads, when actually it needed to get the attention of the user and drive brand salience. Now you take owned, earned and paid campaigns, and layer that data over awareness, consideration, acquisition and advocacy.. You can see the massive challenge appearing. The underlying problem here is incorrect campaign taxonomy to identify and categorise campaigns across the 4 phases of the buying funnel. I haven't seen a brand or agency get this right yet.
Problem #3 - misaligned metrics to the end-user
Just as important, perhaps even more important - is the fact that reports are not being read because they are either too complicate and/or don't answer the "so what". Lots of effort goes into creating these reports every month but with very little return on value and zero actionability from the report is the echo I hear amongst marketing and brand managers. This is because the reader (decision maker) isn’t looking at metrics that matter to them. A big driving force behind a person's career is financial wellbeing. NOT the only driving force but definitely something we worry about every time we receive our pay cheque at the end of the month. So if someone is looking at a report that can help them earn more income, then you have their attention AND as long as the reporting is aligned to business growth goals, then you have even further alignment.
The opportunity
The solution to this is to build a marketing team with really good habits and to pull their agency partners alongside them, agree on a set of metrics that will drive business growth and keep everyone motivated to love their data.
The DataLove Bootcamp aims to rectify these problems and to show the marketing industry that there is a better way to work with data. This requires a solid measurement framework that caters for both brand and performance metrics, coupled with brand/client adoption and good habits.
From experience, I’ve seen that teams with good habits are much better positioned to report as they have good data. However, if your team has bad habits, I’ll take a bet that their data quality is bad as well. Hence their reporting isn't driving actions from their insights.
If we want to change marketers day-to-day activities from being reactive and remaining in hindsight mode, we need to change our habits so we can enter into the world of foresight, which will result in revenue generating and cost saving insights for businesses.
To find out how to solve this problem, go ahead and register for the DataLove Bootcamp, starting 28 June 2021.