Datalider leverage deep insight into consumers and customers to inspire frame-breaking and high-impact thinking in all aspects of marketing, branding, sales, and pricing. To help our clients gain competitive advantage, we use Advanced Analytics for deep understanding of organizational processes to unlock the full marketing and sales potential.
Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). Understanding marketing analytics allows marketers to be more efficient at their jobs.
Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can offer profound insights into customer preferences and trends. Despite these compelling benefits, a majority of organizations fail to ever realize the promises of marketing analytics. According to a survey of senior marketing executives published in the Harvard Business Review, “more than 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their ability to measure marketing ROI.”
The importance of Marketing Analyics is obvious: if something costs more than it returns, it’s not a good long-term business strategy. In a 2008 study, the Lenskold Group found that “companies making improvements in their measurement and ROI capabilities were more likely to report outgrowing competitors and a higher level of effectiveness and efficiency in their marketing.” Simply put: Knowledge is power. Marketing analytics, allow you to monitor campaigns and their respective outcomes, enabling you to spend each dollar as effectively as possible.
Imagine that you’re driving your car down the highway. You know where you’re going, and you have a general idea of which route to take, but you have no dashboard. You’re completely ignorant of how fast you’re going, how much fuel is in the tank, or even if the engine is overheating. If your “check engine” light is on to indicate some sort of problem, you don’t know about it. If luck is on your side, you can drive your car under these conditions to the end of your journey. But continuing to operate your vehicle over time without the information the dashboard provides is tempting fate. Eventually, a problem will occur that you can’t detect. Without the dashboard, you’re blind to the performance of the vehicle. Ultimately, driving this way will lead to consequences, some of them quite severe. You could easily end up in the ditch on the side of the road.
This vehicle metaphor applies to organizations and the analytics – their dashboards-that help them keep their marketing engines running effectively. A properly implemented analytics process helps a marketing organization avoid negative consequences. But analytics aren’t just about keeping marketing out of the ditch; analytics help optimize marketing’s performance. An analytics process, therefore, isn’t just about keeping the marketing organization out of trouble but helping it perform at its highest level.
The marketing analytics process isn’t just about keeping the marketing organization out of trouble but helping it perform at its highest level.
For most companies, analytics are at the heart of how the business is managed. The finance department is perhaps most often associated with measurements and analytics with which the entire organization is familiar: revenue, profit, return on investment (ROI), return on equity (ROE), and many others. Manufacturing tracks metrics like output and defects. Human resources will measure employee retention and performance. Every department or division in a company uses analytics to make sure there is alignment with and progress toward goals. The outlier has often been marketing. Even today, 14 percent of marketing organizations don’t have an analytics process, 1 a reflection of marketing’s historical reluctance toward analytics.
The generic understanding of analytics is that they are measurements or numbers that indicate how a process is performing. This definition certainly holds true for marketing analytics, yet a deeper understanding of analytics helps marketing organizations take full advantage of what the process can do to drive better performance. To that end, here is definition:
Marketing analytics is the process of identifying metrics that are valid indicators of marketing’s performance in pursuit of its objectives, tracking those metrics over time, and using the results to improve how marketing does it work.
The core components of this definition are worth examining more closely:
Valid indicators: There are many things about marketing’s work and results that are measurable. Not all of them, however, are true indicators of performance. The analytics process must determine which metrics have meaning and best represent the value that marketing creates for the organization.
Pursuit of objectives: The analytics process is ideally built to measure progress toward a set of objectives.
Tracking metrics over time:The analytics process isn’t about taking a random, one-time snapshot of a performance measurement, but tracking measurements over time to monitor trends and direction of performance.
Improve how marketing works:There are several reasons a marketing organization might implement an analytics process, such as accountability or justification of resources, but the noblest and ultimately most valuable reason is to improve its performance.
As the definition for marketing analytics implies, it isn’t just a set of numbers. Instead, it is a process that has these primary components:
People: The marketing analytics process is created, executed, and managed by people who own it. In most marketing organizations, the process owner is the chief marketing officer (CMO) or the marketing director.
Steps: The marketing analytics process consists of a sequence of steps.
Tools and technology: While the marketing analytics process isn’t necessarily complex, tools and technology help marketing organizations deliver greater value faster than they ordinarily might.
Input and output: Data feeds the process, with insights and decisions as the output of the process.
Like many processes, marketing analytics should have a definite beginning but no ending-it is a process that, once initiated, should continue indefinitely.
To say that digital marketers have to be jacks-of-all-trades is a considerable understatement. Marketers don’t often get the recognition they deserve for having to master so many different software tools, but if there’s one profession that requires knowledge of more tools than a Swiss army knife, Digital Marketing is it.
Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it involves the use of channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t, in real time.
Datalider works with clients to help marketers monitor things like what is being viewed, how often and for how long, sales conversions, what content works and doesn’t work, etc. While the Internet is, perhaps, the channel most closely associated with digital marketing, others include wireless text messaging, mobile instant messaging, mobile apps, podcasts, electronic billboards, digital television and radio channels, etc.
” In the face of change we have three options: ignore it, grow with it, or drive it. “ — Gerard Puccio, Marie Mance, Laura Barbero Switalski, Paul Reali Creativity Rising
No one needs to tell us that the world of marketing is changing fast. We are living it. Low-cost and ubiquitous communications technology is irrevocably altering human behavior, causing seismic shifts in marketing philosophy, practices, and careers. At its core, marketing is still about creating and keeping customers, but the how-to questions for accomplishing this have changed considerably.
The Web has empowered people everywhere. Whether in New York or Nairobi, today’s customers are connected, informed, and more vocal than they have been in the past. Anyone with a connected device-39 percent of the world as of 2013-now has access to all of the world’s knowledge and many of its citizens. With these resources at their fingertips, our prospects and customers can discover and investigate anything and everything, establish decision-making criteria, seek opinions from their peers, evaluate their options, and share their impressions and experience with others, anytime and anywhere. As a result, the relationship between businesses and their customers has been dramatically altered: our customers are now firmly in charge of the buying process.
Digital Has Changed the Game
In the predigital landscape, our prospects undertook a straightforward purchase journey that we likened to a funnel. The process began with a need or desire that our prospects chose to address. Salespeople were involved early on, helping to establish decision-making criteria. Our job as marketers was to build awareness and create materials that made the case for why our solutions should be adopted. Many consumer brands had loyalty programs to encourage retention, but not much attention was devoted to post-purchase engagement.
The generic understanding of analytics is that they are measurements or numbers that indicate how a process is performing. This definition certainly holds true for marketing analytics, yet a deeper understanding of analytics helps marketing organizations take full advantage of what the process can do to drive better performance. To that end, here is definition:
Digital has dealt us all new cards. Today’s customer journey still starts with a need or a desire, but our prospects often undertake an at times lengthy period of silent due diligence during which time they discover and evaluate their options via the web. During this period of discovery our prospects’ consideration set often grows rather than narrows. According to Google’s Zero Moment of Truth study, the average person pulls information from 10.4 sources before making a purchase.3 Some of the most influential sources are other people’s unfiltered post-purchase commentary. Salespeople enter the process at a much later stage for business-to-business purchases; most e-commerce purchases can be made independently.
Marketers have become essential to the purchase process, as more often than not, content is the tool that breaks through this silent due diligence, initiating a conversation between us and our prospects. Recognizing this shift, marketers have become content publishers, experts at creating useful resources that address our prospects’ and customers’ underlying needs and desires. If these experiences resonate, we may be invited into the purchase process. Serving as trusted advisors, rather than biased advocates for our company’s products and services, we create the conditions for our prospects and customers to evaluate for themselves whether we make the grade.
Social media has multiplied the potential points of connection with our prospects and customers and its interactive nature has turned static text into cross-channel dialogue. As we blog, tweet, host webinars, publish white papers, produce videos, and curate Pinterest boards, we generate living assets that can draw prospects to us. As we come to know these people as individuals through careful observation of their digital body language, our encounters become more personalized, incorporating predictive analytics to enhance their usefulness.
Consumers are connecting and interacting with media and brands in more sophisticated and engaging ways than ever before. Hiture help you understand, down to the last eyelash, who your most valuable consumers are and how they behave.
Consumers can seem fickle and contrary, but when you have the right information they’re actually pretty predictable. We make it our business to measure and understand them from every angle, then give you the tools and insights to make informed decisions. When you know all that we do about your consumers, you can take action that grows your business.
For every action your consumers take – making a purchase, watching an advertisement, browsing a store, surfing the internet, engaging in social media – there are an infinite number of data points. Our unique ability to bring multiple sources together means you’ll spend less time harmonizing data and more time putting the consumer insights to use.
Whether you need to know about current or potential consumers, we have the measurements, solutions and methodologies to help. Tailored to align with your business objectives, our Consumer Insights solutions put data into perspective so you can understand what you’re doing right and where and how to improve.
Keeping Consumers and Stakeholders Happy – from Research, Through Measurement, to Management
Organizations need consumer insight for much more than supporting specific marketing or service decisions. Consumer insight is an essential part of a mechanism that tells the organization whether it is meeting its consumers’ needs while meeting the needs of other stakeholders. These include owners (such as shareholders), business partners (such as distributors and marketing service suppliers) and staff – particularly those who have to manage consumers, in stores or branches, contact centres, and leisure and transport facilities. This use of consumer insight is very important. Perhaps the best example is customer satisfaction surveys, but we also include measurement of the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and other initiatives.
This area is controversial because despite all the science of market research and customer database analysis, consumer insight is rarely used properly in this area. So rather than bury this discussion in the body of the book, we decided that we needed to air it at the beginning. This gives organizations something else to worry about – whether marketing and customer service are doing their job properly or whether they need transforming. Much in the planning of marketing and management has not changed for years, although the rapid evolution of information and communications technology has changed many areas. Hiture are engaged in a programme of research and consulting in an area we have defined as ‘marketing transformation’. Much of the work that we are doing relates to changes in how customers are managed, and in particular how insights into customers are developed and used.
Measuring customer satisfaction has become very big business. Many market research companies make much of their profit from it. Staff measurement and motivation systems are increasingly based on customer satisfaction targets. Despite this, surveys show declining customer satisfaction in most markets. Setting targets and measuring customer satisfaction do not make customers any happier, or more likely to repurchase. Much socalled consumer insight purports to tell organizations what their consumers want, but only tells them what they have said – very different. This may be because if an organization focuses only on what consumers say about its products or services, this can stifle its creativity and limit innovation. Setting staff targets using information based on what consumers are saying they want can make the situation worse. Organizations are driven in the direction of their targets and measures. This is fine if the measures and targets are something that the people in the business and its stakeholders and consumers truly want, but this is rare. Customers may say they want to be answered more quickly in call centres. However, they might give much higher priority to better value for money. They might be happy to make compromises in terms of ease of access by telephone. The success of low-cost airlines demonstrates this.
The targets and measures being set in larger companies and public service organizations have become increasingly complex and controlling in the last few years. ‘If you can measure it you can manage it’ has spread like a cancer. This led to large-scale customer satisfaction surveys, targets and league tables – and a fall in customer loyalty and overall satisfaction. The focus has been on winning the league rather than offering customers the products or services they want. This focus has become internal, leading staff and the entire organization away from first considering the customer.
League tables and metrics induce stress. They focus mainly on cost reduction and control. Neither motivate staff. They stifle innovation and bold thinking, vital for success. Retention of good staff gets harder. Negative staff behaviour spreads. Perhaps the best example is replying quickly to complaints rather than resolving them. Organizations have targets for so many areas that are nothing to do with the organization’s original intent. For a target to move a business the direction its customers would really like, targets should relate to things customers and staff both want, to the real reasons customers buy its products or services, not to transactional factors whose only justification for inclusion is that they are easy to measure.
In many health service organizations, the strategic intent is far removed from where it should be. A health service’s reason for being is about helping new humans be born, keeping people as healthy as possible, and where this fails, healing and sustaining them and in the end, helping them die with dignity and minimum pain. For many health workers, measures are not related to any of these. Rather, measures are process and transaction-based, counting beds, people on trolleys, queue lengths, waiting times and costs to serve, all important in achieving efficiencies, but not delivering the service people need.
Wherever there is a disconnect between the internal measures and the real reason a company or organization exists, there is stress, because staff know they are not doing what they should really be doing. Short-term thinking dominates because the organization is only trying to hit the next target. Consumers are unhappy because they can feel the organization’s pain every time they deal with it.
We identify most critical business goals of our clients, and then we align human capital management, leadership, enterprise learning and organization change capability to help deliver positive, measurable outcomes.
Datalider integrated focus on organization change management is an approach to organization change based os insight-driven analytics and proven methods to increase the pace, certainty and successful outcomes of our clients’ organization change programs.
Datalider Organizational Change service can enable your company to manage change with precision and more predictable results, at a pace that is faster and more effective than your peers. Traditional change management activities, like training and communication, are no longer enough to help drive change at the scale and pace required today. Our integrated approach can help your company grow at the speed of change.
To say that digital marketers have to be jacks-of-all-trades is a considerable understatement. Marketers don’t often get the recognition they deserve for having to master so many different software tools, but if there’s one profession that requires knowledge of more tools than a Swiss army knife, Digital Marketing is it.
Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it involves the use of channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t, in real time.
Datalider works with clients to help marketers monitor things like what is being viewed, how often and for how long, sales conversions, what content works and doesn’t work, etc. While the Internet is, perhaps, the channel most closely associated with digital marketing, others include wireless text messaging, mobile instant messaging, mobile apps, podcasts, electronic billboards, digital television and radio channels, etc.
” In the face of change we have three options: ignore it, grow with it, or drive it. “ — Gerard Puccio, Marie Mance, Laura Barbero Switalski, Paul Reali Creativity Rising
No one needs to tell us that the world of marketing is changing fast. We are living it. Low-cost and ubiquitous communications technology is irrevocably altering human behavior, causing seismic shifts in marketing philosophy, practices, and careers. At its core, marketing is still about creating and keeping customers, but the how-to questions for accomplishing this have changed considerably.
The Web has empowered people everywhere. Whether in New York or Nairobi, today’s customers are connected, informed, and more vocal than they have been in the past. Anyone with a connected device-39 percent of the world as of 2013-now has access to all of the world’s knowledge and many of its citizens. With these resources at their fingertips, our prospects and customers can discover and investigate anything and everything, establish decision-making criteria, seek opinions from their peers, evaluate their options, and share their impressions and experience with others, anytime and anywhere. As a result, the relationship between businesses and their customers has been dramatically altered: our customers are now firmly in charge of the buying process.
Digital Has Changed the Game
In the predigital landscape, our prospects undertook a straightforward purchase journey that we likened to a funnel. The process began with a need or desire that our prospects chose to address. Salespeople were involved early on, helping to establish decision-making criteria. Our job as marketers was to build awareness and create materials that made the case for why our solutions should be adopted. Many consumer brands had loyalty programs to encourage retention, but not much attention was devoted to post-purchase engagement.
The generic understanding of analytics is that they are measurements or numbers that indicate how a process is performing. This definition certainly holds true for marketing analytics, yet a deeper understanding of analytics helps marketing organizations take full advantage of what the process can do to drive better performance. To that end, here is definition:
Digital has dealt us all new cards. Today’s customer journey still starts with a need or a desire, but our prospects often undertake an at times lengthy period of silent due diligence during which time they discover and evaluate their options via the web. During this period of discovery our prospects’ consideration set often grows rather than narrows. According to Google’s Zero Moment of Truth study, the average person pulls information from 10.4 sources before making a purchase.3 Some of the most influential sources are other people’s unfiltered post-purchase commentary. Salespeople enter the process at a much later stage for business-to-business purchases; most e-commerce purchases can be made independently.
Marketers have become essential to the purchase process, as more often than not, content is the tool that breaks through this silent due diligence, initiating a conversation between us and our prospects. Recognizing this shift, marketers have become content publishers, experts at creating useful resources that address our prospects’ and customers’ underlying needs and desires. If these experiences resonate, we may be invited into the purchase process. Serving as trusted advisors, rather than biased advocates for our company’s products and services, we create the conditions for our prospects and customers to evaluate for themselves whether we make the grade.
Social media has multiplied the potential points of connection with our prospects and customers and its interactive nature has turned static text into cross-channel dialogue. As we blog, tweet, host webinars, publish white papers, produce videos, and curate Pinterest boards, we generate living assets that can draw prospects to us. As we come to know these people as individuals through careful observation of their digital body language, our encounters become more personalized, incorporating predictive analytics to enhance their usefulness.
Datalider works with clients to build a competitive, measurable, and sustainable staffing advantage through strategic focus, business connection, and excellence in execution. Business strategy drives work force needs. At the same time, work force imperatives condition business strategy success.
Wisewell is uniquely positioned to understand and help address the personnel issues of clients. Our studies in people advantage are among the most comprehensive and renowned fact-based studies of the topic. The combination of our business and work force expertise makes us a preferred partner, and we have a proven track record of linking people with businesses while applying the right analyses and instruments to help them not only make informed staff decisions but fully implement them.
All rights reserved.
© 2025
