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IN THE AGE OF INTEGRATION
MARKETING DATA MANAGEMENT
What exactly does that mean, and why is integration sud-
denly so critical?
Modern marketing is complex. Doing it well requires an
integrated point of view, and that means being able to look
at integrated marketing data. If our data isn’t integrated,
integrated insights don’t happen. We can’t design, manage
or optimize integrated customer experiences. Without inte-
grated marketing data, we’re flying blind.
To understand marketing data management in the age of
integration, let’s take a look at:
• How marketing became so complex and data got so big
• Why an integrated approach to data is the way forward
• What’s possible when we manage data right
• What integrated marketing data management looks like
• Integrated marketing as a never-ending journey
“In order to be a sought-after marketing
leader in the next five years, you will
need to become the master integrator of
the marketing function in all its modern
complexity.”
—Rory Finlay, Executive Recruiter, Egon Zehnder
BIG DATA, CRAZY COMPLEX MARKETING
From the time we first started trademarking
our brands in the late 19th century, to radio ad-
vertising in the 1920s, TV ads in the 1940s, tele-
marketing in the ‘50s and database marketing
in the ‘80s, the marketing discipline just kept
getting more sophisticated and successful.
But after more than a century as a formal (and
increasingly powerful) discipline, marketing has
suddenly become crazy complex, extremely
difficult and frustratingly inefficient.
What happened? We added “digital” to our
vernacular. Digital was not just an utterly new
channel, but a superhighway of channel after
channel after channel—SEO, PPC, email market-
ing, display advertising, e-commerce and more.
And each of these new channels came with
its own set of big problems, big requirements
and—you got it—big data. Oceans of data.
Galaxies of data. Data like marketers had never
seen.
And now here we are, marketing in the midst of
a Cambrian explosion of channels, technologies
and apps with no end in sight—a tsunami of
constantly accelerating innovation (read: more
data). Just when we think we’ve figured out
Facebook and Twitter, here comes Pinterest
and SlideShare.
WHY AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO DATA
IS THE WAY FORWARD
To our credit, since all this complexity landed
on us we’ve become very good at using data
to optimize individual channels. We optimize
email by subject lines and time of day to get
the highest open rates. Our search agencies
optimize keyword buys by experimenting with
ad copy and offers to get better click-through
rates. We even know that tweets with images
get retweeted more often than those without.
But in the age of integration, optimizing individ-
ual channels doesn’t move the needle on the
business in any real way.
Cross-channel optimization is where the
potential for breakthrough performance lies.
Because, as we all know, customers become
aware of us in this and that channel, engage
us in two or three others, buy from us in
several more, and create buzz for us in others
still. Visibility into that big picture—how our
campaigns and initiatives perform across the
entire customer journey—is indispensable
for making cross-channel decisions that
drive more efficient and effective use of our
hard-won marketing dollars.
And if we want cross-channel insights—to be
able to see at a glance what’s working across
it all—we need to integrate our channel data.
THE BENEFITS OF MANAGING DATA RIGHT
Well-managed marketing data can give us
unprecedented cross-channel insight and
make decisions clearer than ever before.
But the vast majority of us aren’t there yet.
Constant technological innovation and the
ever-changing consumer behavior that goes
with it breed a chronic feeling that we aren’t
taking full advantage of what the digital age
and the harder it is to get those answers.
Hard, that is, if we keep trying to do it the same
old way. The most sought-after marketing lead-
ers are intentional. They don’t try to swallow
the ocean of data and then attempt to figure
out later what they’ve captured and what it all
means. Instead, they de-
cide up front how they
want to move the needle
on the business, and
then capture the data
that matters so they can
measure their success.
They’re laser-focused on
marketing performance,
not marketing activity.
They’re interested in
how creative treatments
perform across media properties, not in count-
ing likes or fans—or even conversions. They
know what’s going on at a high level: if their
last campaign was great for TV but flopped in
print; if their several-hundred-thousand-dollar
PPC budget has performed any better since
they switched agencies; if they also get more
earned media when they boost paid spend.
When today’s top marketers are asked to
report on return on marketing investment
(ROMI), they’re able to say things like:
• Our most cost-effective marketing channel is
Google AdWords, where, through ongoing opti-
mization, we've brought the cost per customer
acquisition down from $17 to $12 in the last 12
months.
• Hands down, the best campaign of 2013 was
the Back to School initiative—it increased foot
has to offer. We know there are cutting-edge
marketers out there who use data to great ef-
fect. And we know it must be possible to, for
instance, correlate our latest print campaign
to retail foot traffic. But we have no idea how
to even begin to cobble that story together.
One thing we know for
sure: We’re not making
the best use of all that
data our marketing
efforts churn up. In
fact, far from helping
us, our marketing data
is overwhelming us. We
spend way too much
time organizing, collect-
ing, amalgamating and
synthesizing marketing
data, which perversely keeps us from becom-
ing better cross-channel marketers. We just
can’t get out of the weeds.
So we give up. Despite (and/or because of)
all the data available to us, we don’t make
marketing analytics a fundamental part of our
marketing initiatives often enough.
We have the sense that the more we grow
as a brand, as a business, as a marketer or
marketing department, the greater our need
for a comprehensive view of our efforts, and
the more interested we must become in
meaty cross-channel insights like which TV
spots generate online buzz and which event
sponsorships drive web traffic. Yet that very
growth—bigger budgets, larger teams—works
against us. The more mature we get, the more
complex the marketing function becomes,
ALL relevant marketing data, no matter the
source—it’s the first step to putting together a
complete picture.
2. Tagged. Every marketer knows the pain of
trying to piece together a coherent story after
the fact of how a particular marketing effort
performed. A taxonomy of marketing KPIs—a
classification system—solves that. As data
comes in, it’s tagged it in all the ways we’ll
want to report on it later. A spend number, say,
is categorized by channel (paid search), time
period (April 2014), agency (iProspect), region
(US), product (retail checking account), media
type (paid), campaign (2014 Winter Olympics),
and so on. Tagging
marketing data on the
way in according to a
comprehensive taxono-
my makes reporting
and insight on the way
out a snap.
3. Centralized.
Cross-channel
strategic insights can
only come out of a
single data repository.
Storing marketing
data in one place is
essential.
4. Normalized.
Apples-to-apples com-
parisons are hard to
come by in marketing.
But they’re essential
for truly understanding cross-channel perfor-
mance and cost-effectiveness. Integrated
marketing requires being able to compare the
value of a click-through with the value of a
traffic to our retail locations by 15% over the
prior year.
• Web traffic spiked by 30-45% following each
Giants game we sponsored last quarter—by far
the best money we've ever spent for awareness.
How do they do it, these would-be marketing
savants, these performance-driven marketers?
The answer is buried in all that marketing data.
And the journey starts with getting that data
in order.
WHAT INTEGRATED MARKETING DATA
MANAGEMENT LOOKS LIKE
Managing marketing
data to enable
continuous, actionable
cross-channel insights
requires an approach
with a specific com-
plexion—a comprehen-
sive, insight-friendly
data structure, if you
will. It must be:
1. Complete. Marketing
data comes in all
forms—spreadsheets,
Word docs, emails,
slide decks, project
plans and more.
Some of that data is
structured and easy to
bring in (spreadsheets
and APIs for example) but much of it is not
(say, a social media report in PDF). Too often,
we fail to capture the data that’s buried in an
inconvenient format. But we need to bring in
retweet, the value of a site visit with a TV ad
impression, and much more. Normalization
means adopting a common denominator or
language for valuing very different marketing
efforts relative to each other—getting our
marketing data management practice to a
point where apples-to-apples comparisons
are possible.
5. Derived. Tactical metrics—descriptive metrics
for specific marketing channels—are not hard
to get. But certain KPIs like engagement rates
and paid/earned media ratios are derived from
those tactical metrics. We want to be able to
easily sum, average, weight and divide raw
data in order to turn tactical metrics into meta
metrics—higher-level data structures that illumi-
nate trends and point us toward opportunities
for optimization.
6. Business-aligned. Marketing analytics
strategy must closely align to the outcomes
the business is driving. Here’s where we build
analytical models that bring insight to what’s
been working (and not) for driving revenue, re-
tention, NPS, CSAT, new customer acquisition
and the like.
7. Visualized. When it comes to gleaning insight
from marketing data, a picture is worth way
more than a thousand words. If our data can’t
be presented such that key insights come to
light quickly and clearly, our marketing perfor-
mance will suffer. But remember, no matter
how pretty our pictures, they’re only as good
as the underlying data—which is why we can’t
skip over the previous steps.
8. Distributed. Sharing marketing data readily
across the team helps us get out of our
decision silos. Get the right data into the
right hands quickly and efficiently, and better
cross-channel decisions will follow.
9. Flexible. No matter how well we manage
our data, someone will eventually make an im-
promptu request or notice a gap in the story
and ask for something we hadn’t planned
to present. So we’ll want to be able to ask
questions of our data in order to perform ad
hoc analyses as needed.
INTEGRATED MARKETING IS A
NEVER-ENDING (AND WORTHWHILE)
JOURNEY
Once our marketing data is complete, tagged,
cohesive, normalized, derived, business-aligned,
visualized, distributed and flexible, we’re ready
to install the technologies and processes that
put our marketing data to work for us—but
that’s the next step in our never-ending journey.
And that’s what marketing is today—a journey,
not a destination. If there is any “arrival”,
it’s getting to the point where we can spot
ongoing optimization opportunities—using
data to tell us how to move our bets around.
Knowing why and when to move spend from
this campaign or channel to that.
Marketing data management in the age of
integration means getting our marketing
data to a place where the promise of ongoing
cross-channel optimization appears on the
horizon is no small feat. Not impossible by any
means, but it takes an initiative—a scoped-out,
planned-for business initiative. Said another
way, integrated performance marketing is
always intentional.
The first step on that journey is to stop drown-
ing and get a cross-channel perspective. Scope
out and resource a project to take control of
your marketing data. Get your head above the
water line so you can see the bigger picture.
Take that first step, and you’re on your way
to being a master integrator of the marketing
function in all its modern complexity, and one
of the sought-after marketing leaders of the
next decade.
BIG DATA, CRAZY COMPLEX MARKETING
From the time we first started trademarking
our brands in the late 19th century, to radio ad-
vertising in the 1920s, TV ads in the 1940s, tele-
marketing in the ‘50s and database marketing
in the ‘80s, the marketing discipline just kept
getting more sophisticated and successful.
But after more than a century as a formal (and
increasingly powerful) discipline, marketing has
suddenly become crazy complex, extremely
difficult and frustratingly inefficient.
What happened? We added “digital” to our
vernacular. Digital was not just an utterly new
channel, but a superhighway of channel after
channel after channel—SEO, PPC, email market-
ing, display advertising, e-commerce and more.
And each of these new channels came with
its own set of big problems, big requirements
and—you got it—big data. Oceans of data.
Galaxies of data. Data like marketers had never
seen.
And now here we are, marketing in the midst of
a Cambrian explosion of channels, technologies
and apps with no end in sight—a tsunami of
constantly accelerating innovation (read: more
data). Just when we think we’ve figured out
Facebook and Twitter, here comes Pinterest
and SlideShare.
WHY AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO DATA
IS THE WAY FORWARD
To our credit, since all this complexity landed
on us we’ve become very good at using data
to optimize individual channels. We optimize
email by subject lines and time of day to get
the highest open rates. Our search agencies
optimize keyword buys by experimenting with
ad copy and offers to get better click-through
rates. We even know that tweets with images
get retweeted more often than those without.
But in the age of integration, optimizing individ-
ual channels doesn’t move the needle on the
business in any real way.
Cross-channel optimization is where the
potential for breakthrough performance lies.
Because, as we all know, customers become
aware of us in this and that channel, engage
us in two or three others, buy from us in
several more, and create buzz for us in others
still. Visibility into that big picture—how our
campaigns and initiatives perform across the
entire customer journey—is indispensable
for making cross-channel decisions that
drive more efficient and effective use of our
hard-won marketing dollars.
And if we want cross-channel insights—to be
able to see at a glance what’s working across
it all—we need to integrate our channel data.
THE BENEFITS OF MANAGING DATA RIGHT
Well-managed marketing data can give us
unprecedented cross-channel insight and
make decisions clearer than ever before.
But the vast majority of us aren’t there yet.
Constant technological innovation and the
ever-changing consumer behavior that goes
with it breed a chronic feeling that we aren’t
taking full advantage of what the digital age
and the harder it is to get those answers.
Hard, that is, if we keep trying to do it the same
old way. The most sought-after marketing lead-
ers are intentional. They don’t try to swallow
the ocean of data and then attempt to figure
out later what they’ve captured and what it all
means. Instead, they de-
cide up front how they
want to move the needle
on the business, and
then capture the data
that matters so they can
measure their success.
They’re laser-focused on
marketing performance,
not marketing activity.
They’re interested in
how creative treatments
perform across media properties, not in count-
ing likes or fans—or even conversions. They
know what’s going on at a high level: if their
last campaign was great for TV but flopped in
print; if their several-hundred-thousand-dollar
PPC budget has performed any better since
they switched agencies; if they also get more
earned media when they boost paid spend.
When today’s top marketers are asked to
report on return on marketing investment
(ROMI), they’re able to say things like:
• Our most cost-effective marketing channel is
Google AdWords, where, through ongoing opti-
mization, we've brought the cost per customer
acquisition down from $17 to $12 in the last 12
months.
• Hands down, the best campaign of 2013 was
the Back to School initiative—it increased foot
has to offer. We know there are cutting-edge
marketers out there who use data to great ef-
fect. And we know it must be possible to, for
instance, correlate our latest print campaign
to retail foot traffic. But we have no idea how
to even begin to cobble that story together.
One thing we know for
sure: We’re not making
the best use of all that
data our marketing
efforts churn up. In
fact, far from helping
us, our marketing data
is overwhelming us. We
spend way too much
time organizing, collect-
ing, amalgamating and
synthesizing marketing
data, which perversely keeps us from becom-
ing better cross-channel marketers. We just
can’t get out of the weeds.
So we give up. Despite (and/or because of)
all the data available to us, we don’t make
marketing analytics a fundamental part of our
marketing initiatives often enough.
We have the sense that the more we grow
as a brand, as a business, as a marketer or
marketing department, the greater our need
for a comprehensive view of our efforts, and
the more interested we must become in
meaty cross-channel insights like which TV
spots generate online buzz and which event
sponsorships drive web traffic. Yet that very
growth—bigger budgets, larger teams—works
against us. The more mature we get, the more
complex the marketing function becomes,
ALL relevant marketing data, no matter the
source—it’s the first step to putting together a
complete picture.
2. Tagged. Every marketer knows the pain of
trying to piece together a coherent story after
the fact of how a particular marketing effort
performed. A taxonomy of marketing KPIs—a
classification system—solves that. As data
comes in, it’s tagged it in all the ways we’ll
want to report on it later. A spend number, say,
is categorized by channel (paid search), time
period (April 2014), agency (iProspect), region
(US), product (retail checking account), media
type (paid), campaign (2014 Winter Olympics),
and so on. Tagging
marketing data on the
way in according to a
comprehensive taxono-
my makes reporting
and insight on the way
out a snap.
3. Centralized.
Cross-channel
strategic insights can
only come out of a
single data repository.
Storing marketing
data in one place is
essential.
4. Normalized.
Apples-to-apples com-
parisons are hard to
come by in marketing.
But they’re essential
for truly understanding cross-channel perfor-
mance and cost-effectiveness. Integrated
marketing requires being able to compare the
value of a click-through with the value of a
traffic to our retail locations by 15% over the
prior year.
• Web traffic spiked by 30-45% following each
Giants game we sponsored last quarter—by far
the best money we've ever spent for awareness.
How do they do it, these would-be marketing
savants, these performance-driven marketers?
The answer is buried in all that marketing data.
And the journey starts with getting that data
in order.
WHAT INTEGRATED MARKETING DATA
MANAGEMENT LOOKS LIKE
Managing marketing
data to enable
continuous, actionable
cross-channel insights
requires an approach
with a specific com-
plexion—a comprehen-
sive, insight-friendly
data structure, if you
will. It must be:
1. Complete. Marketing
data comes in all
forms—spreadsheets,
Word docs, emails,
slide decks, project
plans and more.
Some of that data is
structured and easy to
bring in (spreadsheets
and APIs for example) but much of it is not
(say, a social media report in PDF). Too often,
we fail to capture the data that’s buried in an
inconvenient format. But we need to bring in
retweet, the value of a site visit with a TV ad
impression, and much more. Normalization
means adopting a common denominator or
language for valuing very different marketing
efforts relative to each other—getting our
marketing data management practice to a
point where apples-to-apples comparisons
are possible.
5. Derived. Tactical metrics—descriptive metrics
for specific marketing channels—are not hard
to get. But certain KPIs like engagement rates
and paid/earned media ratios are derived from
those tactical metrics. We want to be able to
easily sum, average, weight and divide raw
data in order to turn tactical metrics into meta
metrics—higher-level data structures that illumi-
nate trends and point us toward opportunities
for optimization.
6. Business-aligned. Marketing analytics
strategy must closely align to the outcomes
the business is driving. Here’s where we build
analytical models that bring insight to what’s
been working (and not) for driving revenue, re-
tention, NPS, CSAT, new customer acquisition
and the like.
7. Visualized. When it comes to gleaning insight
from marketing data, a picture is worth way
more than a thousand words. If our data can’t
be presented such that key insights come to
light quickly and clearly, our marketing perfor-
mance will suffer. But remember, no matter
how pretty our pictures, they’re only as good
as the underlying data—which is why we can’t
skip over the previous steps.
8. Distributed. Sharing marketing data readily
across the team helps us get out of our
decision silos. Get the right data into the
right hands quickly and efficiently, and better
cross-channel decisions will follow.
9. Flexible. No matter how well we manage
our data, someone will eventually make an im-
promptu request or notice a gap in the story
and ask for something we hadn’t planned
to present. So we’ll want to be able to ask
questions of our data in order to perform ad
hoc analyses as needed.
INTEGRATED MARKETING IS A
NEVER-ENDING (AND WORTHWHILE)
JOURNEY
Once our marketing data is complete, tagged,
cohesive, normalized, derived, business-aligned,
visualized, distributed and flexible, we’re ready
to install the technologies and processes that
put our marketing data to work for us—but
that’s the next step in our never-ending journey.
And that’s what marketing is today—a journey,
not a destination. If there is any “arrival”,
it’s getting to the point where we can spot
ongoing optimization opportunities—using
data to tell us how to move our bets around.
Knowing why and when to move spend from
this campaign or channel to that.
Marketing data management in the age of
integration means getting our marketing
data to a place where the promise of ongoing
cross-channel optimization appears on the
horizon is no small feat. Not impossible by any
means, but it takes an initiative—a scoped-out,
planned-for business initiative. Said another
way, integrated performance marketing is
always intentional.
The first step on that journey is to stop drown-
ing and get a cross-channel perspective. Scope
out and resource a project to take control of
your marketing data. Get your head above the
water line so you can see the bigger picture.
Take that first step, and you’re on your way
to being a master integrator of the marketing
function in all its modern complexity, and one
of the sought-after marketing leaders of the
next decade.
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%Feb 2012 Aug 2012 Feb 2013 Aug 2013 Feb 2014
37% 35%30.4% 29%
32.5%
PERCENTAGE OF PROJECTS USING AVAILABLE OR REQUESTED MARKETING ANALYTICS
BIG DATA, CRAZY COMPLEX MARKETING
From the time we first started trademarking
our brands in the late 19th century, to radio ad-
vertising in the 1920s, TV ads in the 1940s, tele-
marketing in the ‘50s and database marketing
in the ‘80s, the marketing discipline just kept
getting more sophisticated and successful.
But after more than a century as a formal (and
increasingly powerful) discipline, marketing has
suddenly become crazy complex, extremely
difficult and frustratingly inefficient.
What happened? We added “digital” to our
vernacular. Digital was not just an utterly new
channel, but a superhighway of channel after
channel after channel—SEO, PPC, email market-
ing, display advertising, e-commerce and more.
And each of these new channels came with
its own set of big problems, big requirements
and—you got it—big data. Oceans of data.
Galaxies of data. Data like marketers had never
seen.
And now here we are, marketing in the midst of
a Cambrian explosion of channels, technologies
and apps with no end in sight—a tsunami of
constantly accelerating innovation (read: more
data). Just when we think we’ve figured out
Facebook and Twitter, here comes Pinterest
and SlideShare.
WHY AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO DATA
IS THE WAY FORWARD
To our credit, since all this complexity landed
on us we’ve become very good at using data
to optimize individual channels. We optimize
email by subject lines and time of day to get
the highest open rates. Our search agencies
optimize keyword buys by experimenting with
ad copy and offers to get better click-through
rates. We even know that tweets with images
get retweeted more often than those without.
But in the age of integration, optimizing individ-
ual channels doesn’t move the needle on the
business in any real way.
Cross-channel optimization is where the
potential for breakthrough performance lies.
Because, as we all know, customers become
aware of us in this and that channel, engage
us in two or three others, buy from us in
several more, and create buzz for us in others
still. Visibility into that big picture—how our
campaigns and initiatives perform across the
entire customer journey—is indispensable
for making cross-channel decisions that
drive more efficient and effective use of our
hard-won marketing dollars.
And if we want cross-channel insights—to be
able to see at a glance what’s working across
it all—we need to integrate our channel data.
THE BENEFITS OF MANAGING DATA RIGHT
Well-managed marketing data can give us
unprecedented cross-channel insight and
make decisions clearer than ever before.
But the vast majority of us aren’t there yet.
Constant technological innovation and the
ever-changing consumer behavior that goes
with it breed a chronic feeling that we aren’t
taking full advantage of what the digital age
and the harder it is to get those answers.
Hard, that is, if we keep trying to do it the same
old way. The most sought-after marketing lead-
ers are intentional. They don’t try to swallow
the ocean of data and then attempt to figure
out later what they’ve captured and what it all
means. Instead, they de-
cide up front how they
want to move the needle
on the business, and
then capture the data
that matters so they can
measure their success.
They’re laser-focused on
marketing performance,
not marketing activity.
They’re interested in
how creative treatments
perform across media properties, not in count-
ing likes or fans—or even conversions. They
know what’s going on at a high level: if their
last campaign was great for TV but flopped in
print; if their several-hundred-thousand-dollar
PPC budget has performed any better since
they switched agencies; if they also get more
earned media when they boost paid spend.
When today’s top marketers are asked to
report on return on marketing investment
(ROMI), they’re able to say things like:
• Our most cost-effective marketing channel is
Google AdWords, where, through ongoing opti-
mization, we've brought the cost per customer
acquisition down from $17 to $12 in the last 12
months.
• Hands down, the best campaign of 2013 was
the Back to School initiative—it increased foot
has to offer. We know there are cutting-edge
marketers out there who use data to great ef-
fect. And we know it must be possible to, for
instance, correlate our latest print campaign
to retail foot traffic. But we have no idea how
to even begin to cobble that story together.
One thing we know for
sure: We’re not making
the best use of all that
data our marketing
efforts churn up. In
fact, far from helping
us, our marketing data
is overwhelming us. We
spend way too much
time organizing, collect-
ing, amalgamating and
synthesizing marketing
data, which perversely keeps us from becom-
ing better cross-channel marketers. We just
can’t get out of the weeds.
So we give up. Despite (and/or because of)
all the data available to us, we don’t make
marketing analytics a fundamental part of our
marketing initiatives often enough.
We have the sense that the more we grow
as a brand, as a business, as a marketer or
marketing department, the greater our need
for a comprehensive view of our efforts, and
the more interested we must become in
meaty cross-channel insights like which TV
spots generate online buzz and which event
sponsorships drive web traffic. Yet that very
growth—bigger budgets, larger teams—works
against us. The more mature we get, the more
complex the marketing function becomes,
ALL relevant marketing data, no matter the
source—it’s the first step to putting together a
complete picture.
2. Tagged. Every marketer knows the pain of
trying to piece together a coherent story after
the fact of how a particular marketing effort
performed. A taxonomy of marketing KPIs—a
classification system—solves that. As data
comes in, it’s tagged it in all the ways we’ll
want to report on it later. A spend number, say,
is categorized by channel (paid search), time
period (April 2014), agency (iProspect), region
(US), product (retail checking account), media
type (paid), campaign (2014 Winter Olympics),
and so on. Tagging
marketing data on the
way in according to a
comprehensive taxono-
my makes reporting
and insight on the way
out a snap.
3. Centralized.
Cross-channel
strategic insights can
only come out of a
single data repository.
Storing marketing
data in one place is
essential.
4. Normalized.
Apples-to-apples com-
parisons are hard to
come by in marketing.
But they’re essential
for truly understanding cross-channel perfor-
mance and cost-effectiveness. Integrated
marketing requires being able to compare the
value of a click-through with the value of a
traffic to our retail locations by 15% over the
prior year.
• Web traffic spiked by 30-45% following each
Giants game we sponsored last quarter—by far
the best money we've ever spent for awareness.
How do they do it, these would-be marketing
savants, these performance-driven marketers?
The answer is buried in all that marketing data.
And the journey starts with getting that data
in order.
WHAT INTEGRATED MARKETING DATA
MANAGEMENT LOOKS LIKE
Managing marketing
data to enable
continuous, actionable
cross-channel insights
requires an approach
with a specific com-
plexion—a comprehen-
sive, insight-friendly
data structure, if you
will. It must be:
1. Complete. Marketing
data comes in all
forms—spreadsheets,
Word docs, emails,
slide decks, project
plans and more.
Some of that data is
structured and easy to
bring in (spreadsheets
and APIs for example) but much of it is not
(say, a social media report in PDF). Too often,
we fail to capture the data that’s buried in an
inconvenient format. But we need to bring in
retweet, the value of a site visit with a TV ad
impression, and much more. Normalization
means adopting a common denominator or
language for valuing very different marketing
efforts relative to each other—getting our
marketing data management practice to a
point where apples-to-apples comparisons
are possible.
5. Derived. Tactical metrics—descriptive metrics
for specific marketing channels—are not hard
to get. But certain KPIs like engagement rates
and paid/earned media ratios are derived from
those tactical metrics. We want to be able to
easily sum, average, weight and divide raw
data in order to turn tactical metrics into meta
metrics—higher-level data structures that illumi-
nate trends and point us toward opportunities
for optimization.
6. Business-aligned. Marketing analytics
strategy must closely align to the outcomes
the business is driving. Here’s where we build
analytical models that bring insight to what’s
been working (and not) for driving revenue, re-
tention, NPS, CSAT, new customer acquisition
and the like.
7. Visualized. When it comes to gleaning insight
from marketing data, a picture is worth way
more than a thousand words. If our data can’t
be presented such that key insights come to
light quickly and clearly, our marketing perfor-
mance will suffer. But remember, no matter
how pretty our pictures, they’re only as good
as the underlying data—which is why we can’t
skip over the previous steps.
8. Distributed. Sharing marketing data readily
across the team helps us get out of our
decision silos. Get the right data into the
right hands quickly and efficiently, and better
cross-channel decisions will follow.
9. Flexible. No matter how well we manage
our data, someone will eventually make an im-
promptu request or notice a gap in the story
and ask for something we hadn’t planned
to present. So we’ll want to be able to ask
questions of our data in order to perform ad
hoc analyses as needed.
INTEGRATED MARKETING IS A
NEVER-ENDING (AND WORTHWHILE)
JOURNEY
Once our marketing data is complete, tagged,
cohesive, normalized, derived, business-aligned,
visualized, distributed and flexible, we’re ready
to install the technologies and processes that
put our marketing data to work for us—but
that’s the next step in our never-ending journey.
And that’s what marketing is today—a journey,
not a destination. If there is any “arrival”,
it’s getting to the point where we can spot
ongoing optimization opportunities—using
data to tell us how to move our bets around.
Knowing why and when to move spend from
this campaign or channel to that.
Marketing data management in the age of
integration means getting our marketing
data to a place where the promise of ongoing
cross-channel optimization appears on the
horizon is no small feat. Not impossible by any
means, but it takes an initiative—a scoped-out,
planned-for business initiative. Said another
way, integrated performance marketing is
always intentional.
The first step on that journey is to stop drown-
ing and get a cross-channel perspective. Scope
out and resource a project to take control of
your marketing data. Get your head above the
water line so you can see the bigger picture.
Take that first step, and you’re on your way
to being a master integrator of the marketing
function in all its modern complexity, and one
of the sought-after marketing leaders of the
next decade.
CHANNEL
WEB
OFFLINE ADS
ONLINE ADS
SEARCH
MOBILE
FACEBOOK ADS
BLOG
CHANNEL DATA
Landing page visits, form completion rate, CRM records, e-commerce
Impressions, brand lift, sales data
Ads served, impressions, CTR
List size, open rate, forwards, unsubscribes, clicks, geo
Clicks, CTR
List size, open rate, redemption rate
Followers, retweets, clicks on embedded links
Friends, fans, likes, comments
Ads served, impressions, CTR
Views, comments, mentions, inbound links
BIG DATA, CRAZY COMPLEX MARKETING
From the time we first started trademarking
our brands in the late 19th century, to radio ad-
vertising in the 1920s, TV ads in the 1940s, tele-
marketing in the ‘50s and database marketing
in the ‘80s, the marketing discipline just kept
getting more sophisticated and successful.
But after more than a century as a formal (and
increasingly powerful) discipline, marketing has
suddenly become crazy complex, extremely
difficult and frustratingly inefficient.
What happened? We added “digital” to our
vernacular. Digital was not just an utterly new
channel, but a superhighway of channel after
channel after channel—SEO, PPC, email market-
ing, display advertising, e-commerce and more.
And each of these new channels came with
its own set of big problems, big requirements
and—you got it—big data. Oceans of data.
Galaxies of data. Data like marketers had never
seen.
And now here we are, marketing in the midst of
a Cambrian explosion of channels, technologies
and apps with no end in sight—a tsunami of
constantly accelerating innovation (read: more
data). Just when we think we’ve figured out
Facebook and Twitter, here comes Pinterest
and SlideShare.
WHY AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO DATA
IS THE WAY FORWARD
To our credit, since all this complexity landed
on us we’ve become very good at using data
to optimize individual channels. We optimize
email by subject lines and time of day to get
the highest open rates. Our search agencies
optimize keyword buys by experimenting with
ad copy and offers to get better click-through
rates. We even know that tweets with images
get retweeted more often than those without.
But in the age of integration, optimizing individ-
ual channels doesn’t move the needle on the
business in any real way.
Cross-channel optimization is where the
potential for breakthrough performance lies.
Because, as we all know, customers become
aware of us in this and that channel, engage
us in two or three others, buy from us in
several more, and create buzz for us in others
still. Visibility into that big picture—how our
campaigns and initiatives perform across the
entire customer journey—is indispensable
for making cross-channel decisions that
drive more efficient and effective use of our
hard-won marketing dollars.
And if we want cross-channel insights—to be
able to see at a glance what’s working across
it all—we need to integrate our channel data.
THE BENEFITS OF MANAGING DATA RIGHT
Well-managed marketing data can give us
unprecedented cross-channel insight and
make decisions clearer than ever before.
But the vast majority of us aren’t there yet.
Constant technological innovation and the
ever-changing consumer behavior that goes
with it breed a chronic feeling that we aren’t
taking full advantage of what the digital age
and the harder it is to get those answers.
Hard, that is, if we keep trying to do it the same
old way. The most sought-after marketing lead-
ers are intentional. They don’t try to swallow
the ocean of data and then attempt to figure
out later what they’ve captured and what it all
means. Instead, they de-
cide up front how they
want to move the needle
on the business, and
then capture the data
that matters so they can
measure their success.
They’re laser-focused on
marketing performance,
not marketing activity.
They’re interested in
how creative treatments
perform across media properties, not in count-
ing likes or fans—or even conversions. They
know what’s going on at a high level: if their
last campaign was great for TV but flopped in
print; if their several-hundred-thousand-dollar
PPC budget has performed any better since
they switched agencies; if they also get more
earned media when they boost paid spend.
When today’s top marketers are asked to
report on return on marketing investment
(ROMI), they’re able to say things like:
• Our most cost-effective marketing channel is
Google AdWords, where, through ongoing opti-
mization, we've brought the cost per customer
acquisition down from $17 to $12 in the last 12
months.
• Hands down, the best campaign of 2013 was
the Back to School initiative—it increased foot
has to offer. We know there are cutting-edge
marketers out there who use data to great ef-
fect. And we know it must be possible to, for
instance, correlate our latest print campaign
to retail foot traffic. But we have no idea how
to even begin to cobble that story together.
One thing we know for
sure: We’re not making
the best use of all that
data our marketing
efforts churn up. In
fact, far from helping
us, our marketing data
is overwhelming us. We
spend way too much
time organizing, collect-
ing, amalgamating and
synthesizing marketing
data, which perversely keeps us from becom-
ing better cross-channel marketers. We just
can’t get out of the weeds.
So we give up. Despite (and/or because of)
all the data available to us, we don’t make
marketing analytics a fundamental part of our
marketing initiatives often enough.
We have the sense that the more we grow
as a brand, as a business, as a marketer or
marketing department, the greater our need
for a comprehensive view of our efforts, and
the more interested we must become in
meaty cross-channel insights like which TV
spots generate online buzz and which event
sponsorships drive web traffic. Yet that very
growth—bigger budgets, larger teams—works
against us. The more mature we get, the more
complex the marketing function becomes,
ALL relevant marketing data, no matter the
source—it’s the first step to putting together a
complete picture.
2. Tagged. Every marketer knows the pain of
trying to piece together a coherent story after
the fact of how a particular marketing effort
performed. A taxonomy of marketing KPIs—a
classification system—solves that. As data
comes in, it’s tagged it in all the ways we’ll
want to report on it later. A spend number, say,
is categorized by channel (paid search), time
period (April 2014), agency (iProspect), region
(US), product (retail checking account), media
type (paid), campaign (2014 Winter Olympics),
and so on. Tagging
marketing data on the
way in according to a
comprehensive taxono-
my makes reporting
and insight on the way
out a snap.
3. Centralized.
Cross-channel
strategic insights can
only come out of a
single data repository.
Storing marketing
data in one place is
essential.
4. Normalized.
Apples-to-apples com-
parisons are hard to
come by in marketing.
But they’re essential
for truly understanding cross-channel perfor-
mance and cost-effectiveness. Integrated
marketing requires being able to compare the
value of a click-through with the value of a
traffic to our retail locations by 15% over the
prior year.
• Web traffic spiked by 30-45% following each
Giants game we sponsored last quarter—by far
the best money we've ever spent for awareness.
How do they do it, these would-be marketing
savants, these performance-driven marketers?
The answer is buried in all that marketing data.
And the journey starts with getting that data
in order.
WHAT INTEGRATED MARKETING DATA
MANAGEMENT LOOKS LIKE
Managing marketing
data to enable
continuous, actionable
cross-channel insights
requires an approach
with a specific com-
plexion—a comprehen-
sive, insight-friendly
data structure, if you
will. It must be:
1. Complete. Marketing
data comes in all
forms—spreadsheets,
Word docs, emails,
slide decks, project
plans and more.
Some of that data is
structured and easy to
bring in (spreadsheets
and APIs for example) but much of it is not
(say, a social media report in PDF). Too often,
we fail to capture the data that’s buried in an
inconvenient format. But we need to bring in
retweet, the value of a site visit with a TV ad
impression, and much more. Normalization
means adopting a common denominator or
language for valuing very different marketing
efforts relative to each other—getting our
marketing data management practice to a
point where apples-to-apples comparisons
are possible.
5. Derived. Tactical metrics—descriptive metrics
for specific marketing channels—are not hard
to get. But certain KPIs like engagement rates
and paid/earned media ratios are derived from
those tactical metrics. We want to be able to
easily sum, average, weight and divide raw
data in order to turn tactical metrics into meta
metrics—higher-level data structures that illumi-
nate trends and point us toward opportunities
for optimization.
6. Business-aligned. Marketing analytics
strategy must closely align to the outcomes
the business is driving. Here’s where we build
analytical models that bring insight to what’s
been working (and not) for driving revenue, re-
tention, NPS, CSAT, new customer acquisition
and the like.
7. Visualized. When it comes to gleaning insight
from marketing data, a picture is worth way
more than a thousand words. If our data can’t
be presented such that key insights come to
light quickly and clearly, our marketing perfor-
mance will suffer. But remember, no matter
how pretty our pictures, they’re only as good
as the underlying data—which is why we can’t
skip over the previous steps.
8. Distributed. Sharing marketing data readily
across the team helps us get out of our
decision silos. Get the right data into the
right hands quickly and efficiently, and better
cross-channel decisions will follow.
9. Flexible. No matter how well we manage
our data, someone will eventually make an im-
promptu request or notice a gap in the story
and ask for something we hadn’t planned
to present. So we’ll want to be able to ask
questions of our data in order to perform ad
hoc analyses as needed.
INTEGRATED MARKETING IS A
NEVER-ENDING (AND WORTHWHILE)
JOURNEY
Once our marketing data is complete, tagged,
cohesive, normalized, derived, business-aligned,
visualized, distributed and flexible, we’re ready
to install the technologies and processes that
put our marketing data to work for us—but
that’s the next step in our never-ending journey.
And that’s what marketing is today—a journey,
not a destination. If there is any “arrival”,
it’s getting to the point where we can spot
ongoing optimization opportunities—using
data to tell us how to move our bets around.
Knowing why and when to move spend from
this campaign or channel to that.
Marketing data management in the age of
integration means getting our marketing
data to a place where the promise of ongoing
cross-channel optimization appears on the
horizon is no small feat. Not impossible by any
means, but it takes an initiative—a scoped-out,
planned-for business initiative. Said another
way, integrated performance marketing is
always intentional.
The first step on that journey is to stop drown-
ing and get a cross-channel perspective. Scope
out and resource a project to take control of
your marketing data. Get your head above the
water line so you can see the bigger picture.
Take that first step, and you’re on your way
to being a master integrator of the marketing
function in all its modern complexity, and one
of the sought-after marketing leaders of the
next decade.
BIG DATA, CRAZY COMPLEX MARKETING
From the time we first started trademarking
our brands in the late 19th century, to radio ad-
vertising in the 1920s, TV ads in the 1940s, tele-
marketing in the ‘50s and database marketing
in the ‘80s, the marketing discipline just kept
getting more sophisticated and successful.
But after more than a century as a formal (and
increasingly powerful) discipline, marketing has
suddenly become crazy complex, extremely
difficult and frustratingly inefficient.
What happened? We added “digital” to our
vernacular. Digital was not just an utterly new
channel, but a superhighway of channel after
channel after channel—SEO, PPC, email market-
ing, display advertising, e-commerce and more.
And each of these new channels came with
its own set of big problems, big requirements
and—you got it—big data. Oceans of data.
Galaxies of data. Data like marketers had never
seen.
And now here we are, marketing in the midst of
a Cambrian explosion of channels, technologies
and apps with no end in sight—a tsunami of
constantly accelerating innovation (read: more
data). Just when we think we’ve figured out
Facebook and Twitter, here comes Pinterest
and SlideShare.
WHY AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO DATA
IS THE WAY FORWARD
To our credit, since all this complexity landed
on us we’ve become very good at using data
to optimize individual channels. We optimize
email by subject lines and time of day to get
the highest open rates. Our search agencies
optimize keyword buys by experimenting with
ad copy and offers to get better click-through
rates. We even know that tweets with images
get retweeted more often than those without.
But in the age of integration, optimizing individ-
ual channels doesn’t move the needle on the
business in any real way.
Cross-channel optimization is where the
potential for breakthrough performance lies.
Because, as we all know, customers become
aware of us in this and that channel, engage
us in two or three others, buy from us in
several more, and create buzz for us in others
still. Visibility into that big picture—how our
campaigns and initiatives perform across the
entire customer journey—is indispensable
for making cross-channel decisions that
drive more efficient and effective use of our
hard-won marketing dollars.
And if we want cross-channel insights—to be
able to see at a glance what’s working across
it all—we need to integrate our channel data.
THE BENEFITS OF MANAGING DATA RIGHT
Well-managed marketing data can give us
unprecedented cross-channel insight and
make decisions clearer than ever before.
But the vast majority of us aren’t there yet.
Constant technological innovation and the
ever-changing consumer behavior that goes
with it breed a chronic feeling that we aren’t
taking full advantage of what the digital age
and the harder it is to get those answers.
Hard, that is, if we keep trying to do it the same
old way. The most sought-after marketing lead-
ers are intentional. They don’t try to swallow
the ocean of data and then attempt to figure
out later what they’ve captured and what it all
means. Instead, they de-
cide up front how they
want to move the needle
on the business, and
then capture the data
that matters so they can
measure their success.
They’re laser-focused on
marketing performance,
not marketing activity.
They’re interested in
how creative treatments
perform across media properties, not in count-
ing likes or fans—or even conversions. They
know what’s going on at a high level: if their
last campaign was great for TV but flopped in
print; if their several-hundred-thousand-dollar
PPC budget has performed any better since
they switched agencies; if they also get more
earned media when they boost paid spend.
When today’s top marketers are asked to
report on return on marketing investment
(ROMI), they’re able to say things like:
• Our most cost-effective marketing channel is
Google AdWords, where, through ongoing opti-
mization, we've brought the cost per customer
acquisition down from $17 to $12 in the last 12
months.
• Hands down, the best campaign of 2013 was
the Back to School initiative—it increased foot
has to offer. We know there are cutting-edge
marketers out there who use data to great ef-
fect. And we know it must be possible to, for
instance, correlate our latest print campaign
to retail foot traffic. But we have no idea how
to even begin to cobble that story together.
One thing we know for
sure: We’re not making
the best use of all that
data our marketing
efforts churn up. In
fact, far from helping
us, our marketing data
is overwhelming us. We
spend way too much
time organizing, collect-
ing, amalgamating and
synthesizing marketing
data, which perversely keeps us from becom-
ing better cross-channel marketers. We just
can’t get out of the weeds.
So we give up. Despite (and/or because of)
all the data available to us, we don’t make
marketing analytics a fundamental part of our
marketing initiatives often enough.
We have the sense that the more we grow
as a brand, as a business, as a marketer or
marketing department, the greater our need
for a comprehensive view of our efforts, and
the more interested we must become in
meaty cross-channel insights like which TV
spots generate online buzz and which event
sponsorships drive web traffic. Yet that very
growth—bigger budgets, larger teams—works
against us. The more mature we get, the more
complex the marketing function becomes,
ALL relevant marketing data, no matter the
source—it’s the first step to putting together a
complete picture.
2. Tagged. Every marketer knows the pain of
trying to piece together a coherent story after
the fact of how a particular marketing effort
performed. A taxonomy of marketing KPIs—a
classification system—solves that. As data
comes in, it’s tagged it in all the ways we’ll
want to report on it later. A spend number, say,
is categorized by channel (paid search), time
period (April 2014), agency (iProspect), region
(US), product (retail checking account), media
type (paid), campaign (2014 Winter Olympics),
and so on. Tagging
marketing data on the
way in according to a
comprehensive taxono-
my makes reporting
and insight on the way
out a snap.
3. Centralized.
Cross-channel
strategic insights can
only come out of a
single data repository.
Storing marketing
data in one place is
essential.
4. Normalized.
Apples-to-apples com-
parisons are hard to
come by in marketing.
But they’re essential
for truly understanding cross-channel perfor-
mance and cost-effectiveness. Integrated
marketing requires being able to compare the
value of a click-through with the value of a
traffic to our retail locations by 15% over the
prior year.
• Web traffic spiked by 30-45% following each
Giants game we sponsored last quarter—by far
the best money we've ever spent for awareness.
How do they do it, these would-be marketing
savants, these performance-driven marketers?
The answer is buried in all that marketing data.
And the journey starts with getting that data
in order.
WHAT INTEGRATED MARKETING DATA
MANAGEMENT LOOKS LIKE
Managing marketing
data to enable
continuous, actionable
cross-channel insights
requires an approach
with a specific com-
plexion—a comprehen-
sive, insight-friendly
data structure, if you
will. It must be:
1. Complete. Marketing
data comes in all
forms—spreadsheets,
Word docs, emails,
slide decks, project
plans and more.
Some of that data is
structured and easy to
bring in (spreadsheets
and APIs for example) but much of it is not
(say, a social media report in PDF). Too often,
we fail to capture the data that’s buried in an
inconvenient format. But we need to bring in
retweet, the value of a site visit with a TV ad
impression, and much more. Normalization
means adopting a common denominator or
language for valuing very different marketing
efforts relative to each other—getting our
marketing data management practice to a
point where apples-to-apples comparisons
are possible.
5. Derived. Tactical metrics—descriptive metrics
for specific marketing channels—are not hard
to get. But certain KPIs like engagement rates
and paid/earned media ratios are derived from
those tactical metrics. We want to be able to
easily sum, average, weight and divide raw
data in order to turn tactical metrics into meta
metrics—higher-level data structures that illumi-
nate trends and point us toward opportunities
for optimization.
6. Business-aligned. Marketing analytics
strategy must closely align to the outcomes
the business is driving. Here’s where we build
analytical models that bring insight to what’s
been working (and not) for driving revenue, re-
tention, NPS, CSAT, new customer acquisition
and the like.
7. Visualized. When it comes to gleaning insight
from marketing data, a picture is worth way
more than a thousand words. If our data can’t
be presented such that key insights come to
light quickly and clearly, our marketing perfor-
mance will suffer. But remember, no matter
how pretty our pictures, they’re only as good
as the underlying data—which is why we can’t
skip over the previous steps.
8. Distributed. Sharing marketing data readily
across the team helps us get out of our
decision silos. Get the right data into the
right hands quickly and efficiently, and better
cross-channel decisions will follow.
9. Flexible. No matter how well we manage
our data, someone will eventually make an im-
promptu request or notice a gap in the story
and ask for something we hadn’t planned
to present. So we’ll want to be able to ask
questions of our data in order to perform ad
hoc analyses as needed.
INTEGRATED MARKETING IS A
NEVER-ENDING (AND WORTHWHILE)
JOURNEY
Once our marketing data is complete, tagged,
cohesive, normalized, derived, business-aligned,
visualized, distributed and flexible, we’re ready
to install the technologies and processes that
put our marketing data to work for us—but
that’s the next step in our never-ending journey.
And that’s what marketing is today—a journey,
not a destination. If there is any “arrival”,
it’s getting to the point where we can spot
ongoing optimization opportunities—using
data to tell us how to move our bets around.
Knowing why and when to move spend from
this campaign or channel to that.
Marketing data management in the age of
integration means getting our marketing
data to a place where the promise of ongoing
cross-channel optimization appears on the
horizon is no small feat. Not impossible by any
means, but it takes an initiative—a scoped-out,
planned-for business initiative. Said another
way, integrated performance marketing is
always intentional.
The first step on that journey is to stop drown-
ing and get a cross-channel perspective. Scope
out and resource a project to take control of
your marketing data. Get your head above the
water line so you can see the bigger picture.
Take that first step, and you’re on your way
to being a master integrator of the marketing
function in all its modern complexity, and one
of the sought-after marketing leaders of the
next decade.
ABOUT BECKON
Beckon is omni-channel analytics software for marketing in all its modern complexity. Our
software-as-a-service platform integrates messy marketing data and delivers rich dashboards for
cross-channel marketing intelligence. Built by marketers for marketers, Beckon is the dashboard to
the CMO—industry best-practice analytics and marketing-impact metrics right out of the box for
ultra-fast time to marketing value. Beckon serves marketers who want to bring order to chaos, make
data-informed optimization decisions, and tell the marketing story in terms of business impact. Find
your strength in numbers with Beckon.
LEARN MORE
Contact us for a complimentary consultation to find out how Beckon can help you better demonstrate
the marketing contribution at your organization.
107 SOUTH B STREET, SUITE 300
SAN MATEO, CA 94401
