Marketing analytics: are you a data-savvy marketer?

Marketers today need to be able to engage with data analysts 

With great power comes great responsibility. As analysts dig in without enough discipline, they may just be analyzing noise.  

“A lot of what people dig into, I think, is noise,” Botkin said. “So, it puts a premium on a marketers’ ability, or an analyst’s ability, to understand what’s important to focus on; what’s the lever that will help us drive the business forward, versus a rabbit hole that’s not going to go anywhere? I think that’s a skillset marketers haven’t needed as much in the past, but that is becoming a premium.”  

So, data provides a unique challenge and a huge opportunity for marketers. “If you’re an online marketer, you have five different ad networks telling you how they’re doing, hourly if you want, and pumping data into your data warehouse… there’s just a limitless number of things that you could look at, and it’s important to be strategic in how you think about using that data,” Botkin said. 

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. “If 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.” 

Marketers can’t possibly tick all the boxes – there is too much that they need to do and not enough time to become good at everything. “There’s a creative side to marketing and a consumer psychological side, and it’s 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 it’s hard to find them. If you’re 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.” 

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. “There’s 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 don’t understand marketing; you almost need to teach it from scratch,” Botkin explained. 

“So, 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 they’re working on.”  

Marketing analytics requires marketing engineering 

Another unsolved problem in marketing is engineering – 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. 

“There’s 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,” Botkin explained. “So, if you’re transforming a legacy marketing team and haven’t built those systems or built them from scratch, or if you’re 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 that’s going to be sort of the marketing analytics part.”  

Finally, he said, marketers also need to get better at thinking about the long-term value of customer engagement. “I think there’s a challenge of making sure that you’re keeping your eye on the long-term value of customer relationships – it’s not about sending 20 emails until your customers open it or unsubscribe.”  

This article first appeared on the UNSW business school website.