Want More From Your Marketing Analytics?

VentureBeat recently published an article from guest, Matthew Westover, urging marketers to demand more from their data. The premise of the article is that data-driven marketing has gotten hung up on using data for targeted ads, but that there are so many other applications for data analysis in marketing. At DataHero, we could not agree more. There are a few points we’d like to add, though.

Cloud-Based Marketing Analytics

Westover explains that marketing data is generally housed in a data management platform (DMP) and that provides marketers with a lot of options for slicing and dicing their data. However, there is actually an incredible amount of data available to marketers coming from the services they use every day online. The modern marketer must know how to create and manage an email campaign, monitor social interactions, track search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and so much more online. These services do not need to pull data into a DMP, they can remain in the cloud and be analyzed in the cloud. Services like DataHero allow you to pull data in from multiple sources, visualize it, then put it in a dashboard to share with your team. This leads to the next point; specialization and optimization.

Specification and Collaboration

Westover compares a marketing team to a race car pit team. Each individual has his or her job, that has been specialized and optimized for that individual and for the team as a whole. A manager needs to be able to see each job and each individual, but also the overarching goals of the organization. This again is where a tool like DataHero is necessary. There may be one marketer working on messaging for sales, another on email campaigns, another on social and so on. If a marketing manager sees all this information in disjointed reports and incongruent formats, it’s really difficult to be able to pick out any insights across the marketing department as a whole. Bringing data into one place encourages fluidity between projects and allows managers to synthesize all the information that’s coming from multiple directions into clear business strategies.

Merging Data

Marketers can not only bring data together in one place with a dashboard, but they can actually merge datasets from various sources to answer higher level questions. The VentureBeat article mentions that a marketing analyst merged data from a customer survey and a third party data to create consumer profiles. Combining data from different datasets would normally be the job of an analyst, but DataHero allows you to drag and drop the datasets you’d like to combine then with a few clicks you have a merged dataset. This dataset can be the result of SurveyMonkey responses merged with census data, for example. Once you take the complex formatting and functions out of the process of combining datasets, marketers can make more informed data decisions based on just about any platform they’re currently using.

Using tools like DataHero doesn’t eliminate the need for DMP, but it allows marketers to work outside of it, analyzing data from the services they already use. There’s no need to be restricted to the data analysis that the data scientists provide, we can empower marketers to get the answers they need on their own, leaving the data scientists unencumbered.

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