Far from worrying about which numbers they should be collecting, senior marketers appear to have the opposite problem. “We’re drowning in numbers,” was a comment from one marketing director, and echoed by others, at a roundtable we held on the topic of tracking ROI last week.
If you’ve invested in analytics software and technology, it’s all too easy to keep on digging into the swathes of data – going further into each channel, initiative and project you’re measuring – and losing sight of the reason you set out to measure things in the first place. The hunger for data can be insatiable.
Our recent free download, The B2B marketers’ guide to tracking and proving marketing ROI, provides five tips for those of you seeing numbers and dashboards when you close your eyes.
- Once you’ve agreed with all stakeholders on which reports you require, don’t add any further reports to the mix, no matter who requests them.
- Unclutter your dashboards. Focus solely on the metrics that matter and those that have an impact on your marketing, sales and business objectives. The rest can stay under the table.
- Don’t sweat the small stuff. You can’t measure and take action on every single variable in your marketing mix, e.g. time of day, day of week and week of month of messaging. Focus on the headline stories rather than the minutiae.
- Include action items with all ROI and marketing metrics reports you circulate. This way, the next step will be a marketing action and not a deeper data dive.
- Follow up on actions in order to ensure your insights lead to progress.
