As leaders of marketing our respective organizations, we are responsible for delivering measurable business results. But many of us have teams who are struggling to manage more channels, more interactions (touchpoints), more performance data, and a more complex marketing ecosystem than ever before. How can we keep pace with the demand to collect, interpret, and act on this avalanche of information?
The following 10 steps provide an executive-level blueprint for implementing enterprise marketing measurement that will increase the quality of the measurement, analysis, and optimization you perform across your entire marketing ecosystem.
#1: Define Your Data Collection And Storage Approach
You need to decide how you are going to collect your marketing data from all of the disparate sources where it currently resides (search engines, ad networks, CRM system/customer database, in-store POS systems, in-house spreadsheets, etc.), and where you are going to consolidate and centralize your enterprisewide view of that data. Three possible data choices include:
>> In-house: This requires your IT organization to collect and manage data through the use of software, hardware, and talent that they build and maintain. An advantage to this approach is that you are not tied to a specific vendor or agency and can change partners without having to move your data.