Joe LaSala, VP of Marketing, looks at what it takes to get an organization to collaborate on marketing measurement

In a recent report by Forrester Research, a leading global research and advisory firm,  “Pave The Path To Marketing Measurement Success” by Jim Nail and Tina Moffett, the effort of turning data into insights is not presented as a “nice-to-have” but rather as a requirement for marketers. Forrester believes that “firms that do not adopt advanced measurement approaches now will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.” And since you don’t want to be left behind, what do you do to ensure proper organizational adoption and that a measurement plan succeeds in the face of resistance to change, disconnected stakeholders, and data quality challenges?

Feel free to judge a report by its title in this case, as Nail and Moffett literally lay out a “path to success.” Here are some of our takeaways on what you can do to make sure you get the most of your marketing measurement plans.

Lay a Strong Foundation with a Collaborative Measurement Process

Marketing teams and leaders clearly see the value of deeper insights but marketing is not an island. Teams across the organization will have stakeholders who will need to be involved from the beginning.  Analytic Partners’ president and CEO, Nancy Smith, is quoted in the report saying, “The first step needs to be a stakeholder alignment discussion to set expectations, define goals, capture questions, and clarify what questions a model can and can’t answer.” This includes the finance team who will have valuable insights into aligning marketing measurement with bottom line numbers – and that benefits everyone. Product teams, customer insights as well as agency partners all play their part as well. Get everyone on the same page!

Communicate Objectives and Insights to Drive Adoption

It is not enough to deliver the model and the resulting insights. Marketing leaders need to communicate to stakeholders the long-term potential of the work and educate the organization on the value of it. This includes sharing long-term objectives, communicating progress versus milestones, and highlighting successes. Change management can be hard, but communication is key to getting everyone moving in the same direction.

Five Steps to Successful Marketing Measurement

Forrester clearly lays out what to do once the foundational work is handled. According to the report, “marketers should follow the five-step process from Forrester’s measurement and insights road map on their path to plan, prepare, build, analyze, and optimize their approach whether they adopt a marketing mix model, digital attribution, or a unified measurement model.”

[caption id="attachment_10900" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] source: “Pave The Path To Marketing Measurement Success”, Forrester Research, Inc., January 2, 2018[/caption]

Forrester summarizes the step as such:

• Plan: Match the scope, approach, and methodology to key stakeholders’ business needs.
• Prepare: Aggregate, cleanse, and normalize data from third parties, first-party, vendors, internal systems, and other sources.
• Build: Apply assumptions and analytic techniques to data to model the impact of weightings and other factors on key business goals.
• Analyze: Uncover insights about how consumer behavior, the effects of media interaction, and brand messages contribute to business goals.
• Optimize: Evaluate the potential performance impact of changes suggested by insights. Incorporate changes to the mix and continue to refine the model.

Are you ready to go down the path to marketing measurement success? Reach out to Analytic Partners for details on how we can help you navigate analytics adoption and change management in your organization.