Make Your Data Sing: Your online and offline data holds a symphony of information - it is important all instruments play in tune
Today many executives are comfortable making decisions based on both online & offline marketing data. They understand that reference sites, repeat visitors, cost per acquisition, lifetime customer value and profit margins together with a host of other variables are important to their business. Unfortunately, decisions based on isolated data points can be short sighted. Whether the intention is to meet or exceed forecasts, disseminate information, generate leads or conduct business via e-commerce, a company performs better when these disparate data points are integrated across the enterprise. In this way, companies turn data into useful information that helps them capture their target market.
Kris Picciotti, a Statistics Consultant with MarketiQ, says: "If used properly, data is the key to every business. Most organizations perform as if online and offline data types are unrelated. They’re not. They are in many ways dependent on one another. Online behavior greatly influences and impacts offline sales activity. When utilized correctly data is transformed into insightful information, thereby providing a tool for improving business methods and marketing know-how."
The goals of marketing, sales, technical and executive teams may appear different on the surface, especially in a large organization. Their differences are often highlighted by back-end systems that don’t communicate, proprietary technologies, and unique types of data both produced and consumed. The constant acting and reacting can create silos across your organization that are difficult to bridge - not to mention create a spreadsheeting nightmare as you try to pull together reports that speak the "language" of another department.
"I’ve worked with the executives from small businesses to large international firms who have increased their online marketing budget, changed direction or shut down campaigns entirely based on incomplete data. The difficulty in these situations is that the right data was not being collected in relation to online and offline activities, and along the way the opportunity to make the right decision was lost. You end up playing a guessing game rather than taking the time to define data needs. It is always better to take the guesswork out of the equation," says Internet Marketing consultant Greg Jenkins.
One of the keys to improving performance both online and offline is to be sure to properly track your efforts. Marketing may define a successful campaign as: "we sent out 10,000 emails." Sales will say the campaign was a hit because "we got 100 leads," and the CEO will define success as "10 new customers." Meanwhile the CFO will define success as "40% margin." Each department by nature needs to heed their internal guideposts and performance metrics, but an intelligent business uses data points across the organization to improve the campaign going forward.
In our solution, capturing number of bounced emails, number of leads per sales territory, and number of leads closed per sales representative paints a more colorful picture. Adding consumer behavior to the mix - which ad was clicked on by young college-age women versus which ad was clicked on by mothers - gives yet another dimension everyone can use. It’s much more efficient to start collecting these data points and integrate them into a more complete picture of your enterprise from the beginning.
Collecting multiple variables, analyzing them and using them in ways that will improve your business doesn’t have to be rocket science. Most of us read the newspaper and understand the pictures, pie charts and graphs very well because they illustrate a point. Imagine what you could do with colorful, dynamic presentations of your own data and the resulting impact on your business. Presentations to board members, investors, prospects or even your own internal staff could be more effective. Data presented as information can be the most persuasive part of your sales pitch, the most motivating part of an individual sales performance review, and shows that your company has a careful, methodical approach to its business.
MarketiQ: Strategies That Click
http://www.marketiQ.net
3905 Davis Place, NW Suite 301
Washington, DC 20007
(202)507-8000
Contact: Greg Jenkins
Email: 
gjenkins@marketiQ.net
August 28, 2008
