Silos. Vacuums. Disparate systems. Whatever you want to call them, they are tall pillars that create a barrier to quantifying the Marketing ROI for any company. Without the destruction of these silos and integration of systems and structuring of data, Omni-Channel Marketing will be impossible.
I’ve worked in organizations where the data comes in from the marketing efforts – email sends, social media interactions, website analytics, etc. – and there is zero way of tying it to the revenue stream. The best we could do was examine the product or service in the marketing campaign and compare it to the revenue that came in within that time frame from that product or service. This loose way of proving the worth of marketing is how most organizations work – and it is A LOT of work without the right tools. Looking at separate systems, digging through names and trying to manually tie revenue and marketing together. It’s a mess and one of the biggest marketing challenges organizations face.
Does this ring true for you? Great. Dump that old way of doing things.
Let’s talk more about Omni-Channel. The very idea of bringing all of the data from internal and external sources together might seem like an unsolvable puzzle. Lisa Arthur, a Forbes contributor, described this data as a ‘Data Hairball’ – “a metaphor to describe the complicated jumble of interactions, applications, data and processes that accumulate haphazardly when companies are unprepared to handle information from a wide range of sources”. Big Data in Marketing is the most difficult, yet most promising challenge there is – if you can untangle it.
The fix lies in the tools that you use to organize the data. They have to be easy to use. They have to integrate with your current systems – and I mean ALL of your systems. They have to be built for the way your business works. These tools will ingest, analyze and regurgitate the data into a single source of customer information.
Having this information all in one place will not only help you get closer to your customers but also make the connections you need to make to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts. From there you will be able to refine your message, process, and types of activities to cut the fat and keep what is truly working for you.
See how a sporting goods retailer used customers’ phone numbers as a way to track revenue from marketing efforts and the growth that resulted.
