The role of marketing analytics in breaking silos

Data and analytics can be a powerful weapon to break down silos and create more effective marketing, but many brands find it difficult to get it right; Ebquity’s Christian Polman explains how in The WARC Guide to structuring for marketing effectiveness.

This month, The WARC Guide examines a topic that successful CMOs understand has the potential to transform a business. (Subscribers can read the full report here.)

“By measuring what matters and aligning marketing objectives with business objectives, they [CMOs] can break down barriers between silos in their organisations, find the optimal balance between long-term brand building and short-term sales activation, and innovate faster,” Polman notes.

“Marketing analytics truly is the key to speaking the language of the C-suite and making a more persuasive case to the CFO for investment,” he adds in his article: Using data and analytics to maximise effectiveness.

The use of disciplines like econometrics and techniques like brand equity modelling allow marketers to understand in ever greater detail which marketing inputs drive what sales outputs and which brand health measures drive business performance for brands.

Of brand equity modelling, in particular, Polman describes it “a powerful demonstration of how best-in-class use of data and analytics can help marketers break down silos between different departments and teams to help to align the entire sales and marketing operation behind overall business objectives”.

Marketers are able to “evaluate the impact of all possible contributions to brand health” by pulling in measures as diverse as customer complaints, the Net Promoter Score, sponsorship, and PR.

“Not only is traditional econometrics not sensitive to these measures, they are also often run by different, siloed teams who don’t have clear line of sight for one another’s data.”

Cutting across the silos inevitably requires cultural change and here “marketing analytics techniques that align a broad array of data from different disciplines have an important role to play in achieving total-company perspective”, Polman argues.

“The key to using metrics, data, and data analytics to achieve that objective is to ensure that brand and marketing metrics are properly aligned to overall business objectives.” Thus, metrics such as the Net Promoter Score or brand equity measures take on greater, cross-departmental significance.

“In the case of brand equity, for instance, metrics that have historically been measures of marketing impact assume the status of metrics of business success and become more closely aligned to business strategy.”

In this way, he says, “data and analytics provide a genuinely transformational opportunity to put marketing at the heart of business operations”.

Sourced from WARC