Are you measuring or are you gathering insights?
Often, Marketing Ops professionals spend too much time trying to piece together different sets of data to answer the questions of the business. It’s hard to get at the real measurements needed (or wanted), and data quality is a constant issue due to data structure or metadata. Perhaps you’ve recently faced a failed project around attribution or marketing measurement. Maybe you’re struggling to connect all the various data sets being created within your martech stack.
Measurement matters.
Not to add more pressure to an already difficult role, but the insights provided by Marketing Ops are used to drive mission-critical activities across the marketing organization. Poor insights mean inefficient and ineffective programs. Even worse, this can lead to incorrect assumptions about Marketing’s impact.
However, there are often struggles with getting the right kinds of data, and aligning that information to create the right kinds of data sets that drive action rather than create more confusion. Marketing teams often have scattered data sets that are are not connecting investments with results data, which ultimately means there is no clear path to understanding ROI.
Marketing insights must be:
Accurate – How real is the information you’re measuring?
Timely – How recent is your data set?
Actionable – How can your information help impact where you’re going to spend your next dollar?
Let’s look at how addressing these three can help teams move from just measuring data to providing actionable insights.
1. Accuracy
A lot of important decisions are made based on inaccurate data sets. And often the most incomplete data is likely saddled within your investment data sets.
Our customers serve as great examples of accuracy in marketing operations.
Red Hat’s high-performing team has prioritized investment data accuracy in order to improve their overall impact. For them, investments are the foundational piece of data that leads to better decisions. Through a concentrated effort to clean up and get a handle on their marketing investments, they were able to get the accuracy of their investment data to 99.98%. Read how they put the foundation for ROI in place with confidence.
2. Timely
Are your Marketing Ops insights timely enough to allow your colleagues to make decisions in the moment? Many firms fail to meet this standard in particular, operating with outdated spend information, taking too long to complete ad hoc data analysis, and wrangling spreadsheets to make sense of data sets.
This wasted time and effort could be spent on improving execution and impact. Marketing Ops teams need a real-time view into actual marketing budgets across departments, business units, geographies, and the ability to pivot budgets to look at activity type, campaigns, goals, or whatever the organization desires.
3. Actionable
The final standard by which Marketing Ops should use to evaluate their measurements is arguably the most important–actionability. What can your colleagues do with the information you’ve provided them?
When Marketing Ops can provide accurate and timely insights related to marketing performance, teams can take action to re-invest dollars faster, increasing the overall ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment). Create a structured approach to ROI to improve decision-making:
Insights come from accurate, timely, and actionable data sets
The ultimate goal of measurement is to pull out insights that empower their teams to make confident decisions about where to invest their next dollar. Global enterprises like Red Hat, Cisco, and GE Digital trust Uptempo to help them create the right data sets that give them real-time visibility into marketing activities that set the stage for the right insights that help create a clear path to ROI.