For marketers, use of data within marketing campaigns is becoming second nature. Similarly, teams in finance and operations rely on data to manage business operations and understand company performance. Tying these sets of data together can help marketing measure how each campaign contributes to the company’s revenue goals. However, getting trusted data in place and using it across multiple countries is more difficult than looking at single countries in isolation.
For B2B companies, understanding the drivers of success can help future planning and investment decisions, as well as providing the platform for future growth. Making use of data is key, but only if the marketing team can collate and manage internal and external data successfully.
1. Know how each international team reports – both for marketing and for finance
One of the biggest issues for company reporting is how different teams or business units report on their performance. Getting an ‘apples to apples’ comparison between different country or regional business units can be hard without governance. Marketers can find this difficult, as well, based on budget allocations and local market variations.
Putting both marketing and finance reporting data together can multiply the problems further, particularly when different teams don’t have the same rigour in place around the data. So, understanding the current reporting processes is an essential first step.
2. Get standards in place, where they apply
After any initial audit on reporting processes and marketing data, the next step is to understand why particular standards are being used for reporting. On the financial side, this may be due to local regulations on recognition of revenue, while on the marketing side this can be driven by existing market conditions, customer targets and previous marketing campaigns that have been completed.
For the finance side, there may be differences between companies’ overall financial reporting and the local requirements. For example, the way in which companies state their finances, when there are multi-year deals involved, can vary. For the overall business, however, taking one approach is necessary for regulatory reporting and tax purposes.
While marketing doesn’t face this same challenge, it’s important to compare performance based on targets that are rooted in the wider business plan, rather than looking at things in isolation. Using the ‘wrong’ financial metrics can turn a marketing win in the real world into a campaign that looks like it did not generate ROI.
3. But let marketing teams be flexible locally, too
Business targets – and therefore the marketing goals that support them — are often set based on overall revenue and projected growth. It’s important to look at the mix of products that the company sells and how the existing marketing mix is being used to support that selling.
Such information can be used to analyse current decisions on which marketing channels to support, but also to simulate new marketing scenarios using ‘what-if’ analysis. This can lead to better results locally, as well as opportunities for those teams to be more innovative.
4. Bring internal and external data together
They say no man is an island. No company is either. For most organisations, external data can provide valuable context into performance against goals. Using external data can help point out reasons for why particular campaigns are proving to be successful. Alternatively, it can show where investment should be re-directed into opportunities that are more likely to close.
5. Don’t get hidebound by existing reporting
Many marketing reports only use output from a single application. If a team looks at social, web and digital projects and analyses response rates, this will only show how that online channel is doing in isolation.
To put this right, it is worth looking at the whole customer journey from initial interest through to completion of deals. This can be taken further by rethinking metrics for performance, too. Changing over to more long-term metrics such as time, and probability to convert leads to revenue, can help.
More accurate data and much more collaboration across other departments and business processes are needed to create these metrics in the first place. However, the result should be more efficient sales processes, as well as more effective use of marketing budgets.
6. Create international data on marketing and business performance
Making global marketing data easily available should produce value for other teams within the business, as well. Sales teams want to close business faster and can use marketing data to help this process. At the same time, management teams want a big picture view of company performance, too.
Multiple teams can use these data sets through visualisation tools and dashboards, where the same data can be explored in different ways and to answer a variety of different questions. The accuracy, consistency and governance of the data are always the biggest challenge. Marketing can take the lead in bringing together data from a wide variety of sources, including marketing automation, social media, ad-tech, web, ERP and CRM systems, into a single unified view. The aim should be to provide data that can create alignment across the matrix of geographies, channels, sales, customers, products and marketing teams.
