According to a survey of CMOs, 2/3 of projects fail to use existing marketing analytics. Only half of CMOs think that marketing analytics have contributed to their company’s performance. In short, marketing analytics has an adoption problem.
Despite this damning finding, the competitive advantage secured by companies who’ve successfully embedded marketing data is clear. Bain & Company report that these companies are ‘2x more likely to be top quartile financial performers and 5x more likely to make decisions “much faster”.’ The majority of CMOs surveyed in the report are convinced that this data has value. They expect to spend more than 12% of their total marketing budgets on marketing analytics over the next three years.
Why is the adoption of marketing analytics so challenging?
There’s a standard litany of excuses that tend to be used when faced with low adoption of a new tool or reporting framework. In most cases, a low use rate for your new tool or data source isn’t because it’s useless, or irrelevant. And no, it’s almost certainly not because the people who work with it are lazy.
The most common reason for failure in this area is that the introduction of any new initiative means an organisational change. This can be a slow process, particularly in large businesses, as anyone who has tried to bring change to an organisation will recognise.
The need to manage change around any new capability is common sense - and it’s been said many times before. In fact it’s probably a line on your project plan, or a few slides in a sales deck. But this level of lip service is as far as most projects and products explore the issue of adoption, until it’s too late.
If your new source of marketing data does what it’s supposed to do - it almost inevitably means people need to make some changes to the way they work, even if it’s as simple as logging in to something new.
In most organisations where people are already busy, implementing a new tool or adjusting to a new data input is rarely going to be a priority.
So how do I get users active and motivated?
We’ve five suggestions to improve adoption – tried and tested across the clients we work with.
1) Introduce a little competition
Harnessing internal competition around key sales metrics is often used to keep sales teams motivated. The same should be true of your marketing teams.
Select a key metric or metrics that your teams need to care about and track / report on it each week or month. Make it visible internally – so that everyone can see how well (or badly!) different teams are doing. For example, if your priority is increasing awareness of your brand – you might want to focus on the reach of your content across channels. If you’re trying to build a community you might focus on the number of registrations for remarketing, followers or new fans you’ve gained.
This tactic tends to work well with larger organisations – especially those with multiple brands, product divisions or markets.
But watch out - it’s important to choose your metric carefully. Unfair competitions aren’t motivating. So stay away from choosing something that varies greatly from team to team, such as anything directly influenced by weight of spend.
2) Recognise and praise success
Success has many friends. In most new implementations there tends to be a core of active users who are reaping the benefits of a more data driven way of working. The difficulty is in getting everyone involved and invested to a similar level.
Make your most active users famous within your organisation. Demonstrate the ways they’re using data to be better, quicker and cleverer. Make it so that other people within your organisation can’t fail to see how well they are doing.
The most useful tools in this space will provide admin. Users/administrators with transparent usage stats for every user, so you can easily identify who your active users are and what they’re finding most useful. Conversely, they should identify who isn’t using the system as frequently, so those people can be offered additional training or assistance.
3) Create a shared view of performance
Whether your company is a giant or a minnow, you’ll know that creating a shared view of success is essential. It means everyone from the CMO to the interns have the same understanding of the goals you’re working towards.
This is usually an intensely political process – because local markets or product teams will always have a reason why the metrics everyone else operates with aren’t right for their ‘unique case’.
This isn’t wrong. Categories and markets have nuances. And it’s pointless to mandate a single view of success that nobody supports. It’s equally as pointless to have 10 different teams using different reporting methods which provide no common ground for a fair appraisal of their success.
Get everyone’s input in drawing up a core, fixed set of metrics that are applicable across all brands and divisions. Then keep interrogating and reviewing these metrics to ensure they are still relevant as the business evolves.
Of course, success measures change by campaign objective – but there are some consistent questions in marketing that tend to always be more or less relevant in each case. For example:
· How many people have I reached?
· How many have meaningfully engaged with my content?
· How many actually bought/registered/followed?
You need to find what’s right for your organisation.
Getting to this level of simplicity can be painful. When you’ve done it, everyone should know what ‘good’ looks like and be held accountable. It’s a key step towards building an organisation that is truly data powered.
It is crucial that the business as a whole believes that the metrics you’ve selected matter. They need to have a demonstrable impact and be beyond reproach. If everyone is invested and feels they are being judged on a level playing field, it helps create a shared sense of purpose within the organisation – not just the marketing department.
4) Bring context to the data
Report fatigue is a massive issue for time poor marketers who need to ruthlessly prioritise the actions they take in the working day. Whizzy reports or dashboards full of charts and numbers are useless without context.
Lack of context makes data less actionable, and this means that people ignore it. If no one is using the data or insight you’ve invested heavily in bringing to them, at least part of the time it’s because it may not be clear what the data means or what they’re supposed to do with it.
The introduction of benchmarks helps remedy this. Benchmarks provide a way of knowing if what you’re seeing is good or bad. They provide an easy way to tell what’s doing well and what needs more attention. A classic example that your service team might already do is to flag an indicator like bounce rate.
What’s important here is not always the exact number itself. It’s the long or short term change in the direction of that metric. Ideally, support your team with tools that automatically track significant changes in your data so they don’t have to spend time looking.
Benchmarks create an environment of greater accountability. Among other things, they help report performance issues as they happen while campaigns are running. Live campaign tracking means marketers can still do something about what they’re seeing, rather than 3 months later at the campaign wash up when it’s too late to make a difference.
5) And finally - make it simple
This is a big problem for analytics tools that focus on only one marketing channel at a time, or suites of tools that have cobbled together multiple different user interfaces. The need to train on multiple tools and become familiar with different approaches is a significant barrier to adoption.
It’s not an intuitive experience to have to jump from site analytics tools to campaign reporting, to social monitoring and back. And it is time consuming. Sadly, the very people who should be expected to make most use of this data holistically so they can deploy marketing investment most effectively are often the people with the least time to focus on learning new and unintuitive tools.
Look for ways to break down these silos and report across paid media, site behaviour, and social data all in one place. Try to remove jargon and additional barriers to accessing the data wherever possible. A system or report that is only useable by specialist analysts will never be universally adopted, so invest in making sure the way you display your marketing data is clear, intuitive and focused.
By Tom Claridge, strategy director at Fabric Worldwide.
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