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Marketing organizations are on a quest to become more data-driven. As a result, they use, on average, about 16 different technology platforms—but only a few organizations reap the full value of their investment.

What's more, the most recent CMOSurvey.org study predicts analytics will consume 19% of Marketing's budget by 2021. About another 22% of the budget will go to technology. Together, those two investments will account for nearly 50% of Marketing's budget.

Yet, the CMOSurvey.org study reports that only about one-third of marketing organizations use analytics to make program or strategic decisions. And less than 20% of respondents reported that the use of analytics made a significant contribution to company performance.

Despite those increases in investment and advances in technology, "marketers are still challenged to maximize the potential value of analytics," according to the most recent CMOSurvey.org study.

Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris, in their classic book, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, provided a road map for becoming an analytical competitor and using analytics to create value and growth—the purview of Marketing.

Marketers should learn to use analytics to address at least five growth opportunities:

  1. Acquisition of more valuable customers
  2. Acquisition of customers who will buy more from you
  3. Acquisition of customers who will buy more of your high-value products/services
  4. Retention of high-value customers
  5. Identification of marketing activities that have the greatest impact on accelerating customer acquisition and improving retention

Move these four analytics capabilities to the top of your list

For a decade, we've known what it takes to fuel growth with analytics. Yet four recurring themes account for the majority of the challenges continuing to thwart the progress of all organizations, including Marketing, regarding analytics:

  1. Lack of quality data
  2. Lack of people (that is, the number of people needed to perform the work)
  3. Lack of skills (the current talent doesn't have the necessary skills to perform the work)
  4. Lack of predictive tools (despite all the technology that is in play, there is still a high need for predictive tools)

By working to improve those four areas, every marketing organization can be smart with its analytics.

1. Collect quality data

Data is the basic ingredient for any analytics. Many organizations continue to be challenged by the sheer volume and problematic quality of data:

  • According to Domo, "over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day." And, it's estimated that 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth by 2020.
  • According to the Experian 2018 Data Management Benchmark report, "on average, respondents in the US believe that 33% of their customer and prospect data is inaccurate in some way—a figure that has increased from 28% just one year prior." That is not a technology problem. That is a human problem. Almost half of the quality issues are related to human error.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Laura Patterson

Laura Patterson is the president of VisionEdge Marketing. A pioneer in Marketing Performance Management, Laura has published four books and she has been recognized for her thought leadership, winning numerous industry awards.