Whether you’re a CMO, VP of Digital Marketing, or marketing analyst, you’re up against the same challenge: maximize marketing’s impact on the business—and prove it.  

Marketing is a key player in driving business revenue by creating brand awareness and generating pipeline. And being able to draw a clear, straight line from marketing investments and activities to business impact is a modern mandate. On top of proving marketing’s contributions to the success of the business, marketing teams are navigating constrained budgets and always-changing market conditions that require the ability to do more with less—all while working fast, flexibly, and efficiently.  

Marketing’s value to the business is clear. What isn’t is marketing’s ability to answer critical business questions; the answers to which are likely hidden in the data—and have the power to make or break marketing’s success and impact. Here are three key questions marketing leaders must be able to answer to empower their people, optimize their departments, and maximize their impact on the business: 

 

1—How is marketing performing overall—across all channels?  

The need—Marketing leaders need to keep a proactive pulse on all marketing activity so they can quickly and confidently identify, report on, and act on gaps and opportunities across channels. And marketing analysts and ops teams are on the hook for enabling marketing leaders with trusted, real-time, accurate, actionable data and insights.  

The problem—Most marketing teams use generic reports that don’t give marketing leaders a full view of channel-specific performance because the data fueling those reports is often stale or incorrect—and comes from a bunch of disconnected sources that are difficult to integrate. Without a single source of truth, marketing analysts and ops teams are forced to keep track of and pull data from many different tools—and navigate the time-consuming process of cleaning and prepping data for consumption. The consequences of not having a complete or true view of marketing performance across channels are difficulties evaluating performance and making decisions that improve it. 

The fix—By bringing disparate data sources together that provide real-time updates and easy consumable reports tailored to specific questions, marketing teams can quickly and confidently answer business questions based on relevant data. Marketing ops and analysts can create dashboards and reports from a single source of truth that enable leaders to trust and act on data-driven insights to improve marketing performance across channels. And marketing leaders can quickly and easily figure out the ROI of each marketing channel to improve overall department performance.  

 

2—What specific marketing tactics are working, which ones aren’t—and why? 

The need—Most marketing leaders will identify with this statement: “I need to be able to watch everything all the way down the funnel. I need one place to go to know if we made the right decisions—and if not, pivot away from channels quickly.” Marketing leaders—managers, directors, and VPs—are responsible for optimizing their channels and making sure prospects are progressing through the funnel. To do this, they need to know what marketing tactics to deploy and the pipeline results to expect. They need to be able to look a layer deeper at performance—that next level down from overall marketing performance that a CMO needs—to understand impact on audience segments, for example, to alter or accelerate in the right areas. 

The problem—Marketing leaders can’t improve channel performance unless they have easy access to trusted, actionable insights that make it clear what’s working and what’s not. When the VP of Digital Marketing, for example, can’t make real-time decisions based on real-time data so she can pivot as quickly as business needs change, everything from her individual performance to her team’s performance to the entire department’s performance to the company’s performance is jeopardized.  

The fix—With a unified view of data across sources that marketing analysts and ops teams can use to create easy-to-read-and-share dashboards and reports, marketing leaders are no longer in the dark about what levers to pull to boost channel performance. With real-time data insights that improve their understanding of channel strengths and weaknesses, they can make decisions from a proactive place. 

 

3—Is marketing making a meaningful, measurable impact on the business?  

The need—Every marketing leader wants to proactively communicate to the c-suite how marketing is contributing to overall company success—in a way that’s backed by trusted data. It’s about more than just perfecting each marketing channel, program, initiative, and tactic—it’s about keeping a pulse on the entire marketing program so leaders can accurately forecast and proactively ensure pipeline coverage and acceleration.  

The problem—With limited access to data—or access to stale, inaccurate data from all over the place—marketing ops and analyst teams can’t present a clear or holistic picture of overall marketing performance. As a result, marketing leaders can’t evaluate the success of their programs—and without understanding, you can’t make decisions that improve the impact of marketing on the entire business. 

The fix—When marketing analysts and ops teams have a platform that ties data from disparate sources together, they can find problem areas, surface actionable insights to marketing leadership, and answer business questions based on relevant, accurate data. And when channel owners know what’s working and what’s not—in real time—they can improve forecasting, efficiencies, and get more leads with less money. And when the entire team is empowered by data experiences that improve decision-making and performance, marketing leaders can run their part of the business with confidence that they’re doing their part to achieve business outcomes.  

 

How data enables marketing’s impact on the business 

The ability to access, understand, and act on trusted data—quickly and easily—separates effective, modern marketers from the rest. The benefits of a platform that puts data to work for everyone in marketing—from analysts creating user-friendly visualizations to the VP making investments based on the actionable insights from those dashboards to the CMO demonstrating marketing’s impact on company growth—are meaningful, measurable, and ensure marketing’s seat at the leadership table. 

With a platform that enables business impact, improves decision-making, and inspires data curiosity, marketing teams can finally go from casual data observers to impactful business owners who make smart decisions that improve outcomes—for marketing and the entire company. But it’s not just about having access to data; it’s about having access to data experiences that enable marketing to: 

• Work with confidence, speed, and agility. Quickly, easily, confidently answer business questions with access to holistic, relevant, accurate, real-time data.  
• Understand what’s working, what’s not, and why—and know what to do next. Get insights that make it easy to understand business performance and the best next actions to improve it. Empower everyone to feel ownership of success across the funnel. 
• Create a department of impact players. Build a data-driven culture that sparks curiosity, collaboration, and alignment; values data-based decisions; and boosts everyone’s engagement and impact.  
• Improve marketing performance and business impact by understanding pipeline contribution, funnel progression, etc. Optimize the entire marketing program and its impact on the business by improving pipeline funnel conversion, campaign effectiveness, CAC (customer acquisition costs), and media mix, among others. 

 

Success stories—marketing leaders using data to answer questions and boost impact 

High-fashion retail company Intermix brought all its customer data together in one dashboard so it could precisely target each customer. With data-driven insights from Domo, Intermix stylists can better customize suggestions and web marketers can reduce acquisition costs. Intermix Director of Analytics and Strategy, Emily Peterson, relies on actionable insights to boost her team’s decision-making and impact: “Domo allows us to marry our customer data with our marketing spend data to inform marketing decisions in a very impactful way.” 

HungerRush is another success story and example of the incredible impact marketing can have on the business with a data experience platform that puts data to work for everyone on the team. Get first-hand insights from HungerRush marketing leaders by registering for the June 14 webinar—Data is Our Marketing Superpower—Lessons from HungerRush.