Marketers today need to be able to engage with data analystsÂ
With great power comes great responsibility. As analysts dig in without enough discipline, they may just be analyzing noise.âŻÂ
âA lot of what people dig into, I think, is noise,â Botkin said. âSo, it puts a premium on a marketersâ ability, or an analystâs ability, to understand whatâs important to focus on; whatâs the lever that will help us drive the business forward, versus a rabbit hole thatâs not going to go anywhere? I think thatâs a skillset marketers havenât needed as much in the past, but that is becoming a premium.â Â
So, data provides a unique challenge and a huge opportunity for marketers. âIf youâre an online marketer, you have five different ad networks telling you how theyâre doing, hourly if you want, and pumping data into your data warehouse⌠thereâs just a limitless number of things that you could look at, and itâs important to be strategic in how you think about using that data,â Botkin said.Â
While marketers do need to become more data-savvy, one of the best and easiest ways to do this is to make friends with a data analyst and learn how to engage with them in a mutually beneficial way. âIf you have a savvy data marketer who can get in there and run their data and focus on things that will help them improve their marketing efforts, that is a great skill set for a modern marketer to have.âÂ
Marketers canât possibly tick all the boxes â there is too much that they need to do and not enough time to become good at everything. âThereâs a creative side to marketing and a consumer psychological side, and itâs hard to get that full mix in any one person. If you rely on all marketers to be like that, you need a team of unicorns, and itâs hard to find them. If youâre a senior marketer, you need to be able to have analysts on your team and engage with them productively, so they work on the right things.âÂ
With the rise of data science and the number of graduates increasing, now is a good time for marketers to learn as much as they can from graduates and offer something in return. âThereâs been an explosion in the number of talented people who could work on significant marketing problems that would help you know your business, but they donât understand marketing; you almost need to teach it from scratch,â Botkin explained.Â
âSo, marketers need data savviness, but data analysts also need business savviness and marketing savviness to work on the right problems and narrow the scope of the kinds of analysis theyâre working on.â Â
Marketing analytics requires marketing engineeringÂ
Another unsolved problem in marketing is engineering â a systematic approach to utilizing data and knowledge to drive effective marketing decision-making and implementation through a technology-enabled and model-supported decision process.Â
âThereâs a need to be able to advocate for the tools and systems that you need, to build those out, and to modernize them over time,â Botkin explained. âSo, if youâre transforming a legacy marketing team and havenât built those systems or built them from scratch, or if youâre at a younger company and just building them up, there will be that challenge. Getting the systems and the data in place is one challenge, but then using that to sort of propel yourself forward is the next one, and thatâs going to be sort of the marketing analytics part.â Â
Finally, he said, marketers also need to get better at thinking about the long-term value of customer engagement. âI think thereâs a challenge of making sure that youâre keeping your eye on the long-term value of customer relationships â itâs not about sending 20 emails until your customers open it or unsubscribe.â Â
This article first appeared on theâŻUNSW business school website.Â