5 New Year’s Resolutions to Refine Your Marketing Analytics Stack

By February, 80% of New Year’s resolutions will have failed. That’s a lot of abandoned goals in such a short span of time. What’s more is that only about 9.2% of individuals feel they’re successful in achieving their New Year’s resolutions.

In today’s post, we’ll go over a handful of practical ideas to help you leverage your marketing analytics stack to its full potential. We’ll take a look at areas in a typical marketing analytics pipeline most marketers can improve on. We’ll then conclude with a quick rundown of a four-step process to really make your data analytics Chinese New Year’s resolutions stick.

5 Chinese New Year’s Resolutions to Refine Your Marketing Analytics Stack [INFOGRAPHIC]

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Resolutions for Marketing Analytics

#1 Strengthen the fundamentals

97% of companies use data to capture business opportunities but only 44% actually trust the numbers flashing on their dashboards. If you’re only looking to keep one New Year’s resolution, it would be to make sure your marketing analytics stay grounded on the goals and decisions that people at different levels in your organization actually make.

#2 Invest more in automation

Gartner says analytics make up the biggest slice (9.2%) of marketing spend in 2017. Two main areas stand out when it comes to marketing analytics spending: customer data and marketing attribution.

In most marketing analytics workflows, a lot of activities are best handled by machines. It’s not hard to imagine how much better life would be with tools like automated dashboards around.

#3 Do more of the exciting stuff

Harvard Business Review explains four ways AI boosts marketer’ productivity when working with data and analytics:

Analyzing huge datasets quickly
Finding and fixing errors in your dataset
Providing real-time feedback, especially for streaming data
Enabling text-based insight extraction

#4 Prescribe, don’t just predict

Analytics typically fall into four types: descriptive (what happened), diagnostic (what went wrong), predictive (what may happen), and prescriptive (what to do). Leveraging prescriptive analytics in your stack speeds up the decision-making process.

The nascent prescriptive analytics market is projected to grow into a $12.4-billion segment by 2022.

#5 Make your data work harder

This year, make sure that the data flowing into your marketing analytics pipeline meets the five dimensions of quality:

Accuracy (Does my data tell me what’s really going on?)
Completeness (Do I have all the data I need to make a decision?)
Cleanliness (Is my data error-free?)
Timeliness (Does my data allow me to respond right away?)
Consistency (Do I have a single version of a given piece of data?)

Steps to Make Your Resolutions Stick

Actually make a resolution

Make sure you’re setting specific, measurable, realistic (SMART) goals for your marketing analytics stack.

Consider adding gamification to your action plan

Make attaining your resolutions enjoyable for everyone involved. Consider gamifying parts of your marketing analytics process. Put the right rewards and incentives in place to motivate your team.

Surround yourself with people who support you

Whether it’s your boss’s nod of approval or your team’s genuine commitment, you want more than just buy-in for your plan. You need help and encouragement from the right people. When times get tough, sometimes all you need is a helping hand to keep going.

Document your progress

Each component of a modern marketing program produces a unique set of metrics and KPIs, often distracting marketers from the things that really matter to the business. The key, according to IBM, is to have a sound understanding of how every marketing activity (and by extension, every set of metrics) contribute to the overall business goal.