A couple weeks ago I went to San Diego, and it had nothing to do with needing a break from what was a long and stormy Utah winter.

Rather, I was there for Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo 2019, an event designed to provide marketing leaders actionable advice about the trends, tools, and emerging technologies they need to deliver business results.

I’m glad I went. Because in addition to getting a little Vitamin D—yes, I did get outdoors for a moment or two—I came away feeling even more bullish about Domo’s potential to become a go-to solution for marketers.

So much of what marketers appear to be looking for is right in Domo’s wheelhouse—especially now that we offer the Domo Marketing Suite, a collection of powerful new apps built on the Domo platform that gives marketing leaders real-time insights to improve performance and drive more value from their digital transformation initiatives.

But I digress. In the two days I was at the symposium, three truths surfaced more often than others.

Truth #1

The tools that marketers were told would make their lives easier and provide better visibility into customer behavior haven’t produced the kinds of returns necessary to justify the investment.

Despite that, investments in marketing tech continue to grow relative to other major budgeting items in marketing, which in turn has only created added pressure to prove ROI.

As Captain Kirk would say, “There’s got to be another way.”

Well, guess what: there is. The aforementioned Domo Marketing Suite makes real-time insights available to every single person in marketing, and in a fashion they can collaborate on, so they can make faster and better decisions around the campaigns they’re running.

Truth #2

Marketers have lots of new ways to slice and dice data, but they don’t have the tools to turn it into actionable intelligence.

Putting more analyst eyes on it isn’t the answer. In fact, Gartner predicts that many of those analysts will be out of a job by 2023 if they can’t figure out a better way to turn all that data into better business results.

The answer is getting more business users to look at data. They have the context that can bring meaning to the data. Until recently, however, there just hasn’t been an easy-to-use tool capable of allowing business users to not only look at data but to analyze it themselves.

Truth #3

In an attempt to get more out of their data, marketers are typically taking one of two approaches: 1) building a best-of-breed—or hub-and-spoke—solution from multiple providers (e.g. one for BI, one for campaigns, one for CRM, etc.); or 2) using one vendor for everything (i.e. one-stop shopping).

By going with one vendor, you gain the advantage of alignment and uniformity. But the truth is, these types of solutions do most things well but nothing great.

That’s why most people try to piece together a stack via the hub-and-spoke model, which is what I recommend. You can get best-in-class solutions, and while the solutions can be siloed, they don’t have to be.

Domo solves that problem by bringing all your disparate systems together, allowing you not only the ability to realize uniformity and alignment but to better prove ROI.

Conclusion

Marketing has been metrics-driven for decades. But analysis of those metrics hasn’t always been easy. Not for the masses, anyway.

In fact, for some marketers, being able to make sense of their data is more difficult now than ever before. The sheer volume of information generated every day supports that reality. The more data we have, the harder it is to see through the noise and concentrate on what matters most.

But companies need to know that solutions do exist. And good ones at that. Which means there’s no time like the present to get your data working for you so you can compete at the pace at which business is moving and win more often.