How a Marketing Analytics Consultant Can Bridge Your Data Insights Gap

Although big data is quickly turning analytics into a core marketing function, many companies are still ramping up their use of data while others have yet to implement the processes and systems needed to deliver the customer intelligence that marketing strategists need.

Indeed, CMOs report that they’ve seen no improvement in marketing knowledge metrics – including sharing valuable marketing knowledge and developing and using customer insights – over the last year, despite all the buzz about data and its potential to increase sales. Further, CMOs say just 35% of marketing decisions are made using analytics.

This underscores one of the major challenges CMOs face: finding professionals who can interpret data, extract critical insights and deliver them to the people who are creating the marketing strategies. The reason? The ability to turn data into insights requires experience in both analytics and marketing strategy.

One way to address the issue is to engage an independent consultant who can focus on establishing or reworking your company’s business intelligence platform. A consultant with expertise in marketing analytics offers a fresh eye, deep subject matter knowledge and the experience to make the all-important connections between raw data and corporate goals.

A marketing analytics consultant can cover your team’s knowledge.

Engaging a marketing analytics consultant offers two distinct benefits. With deep subject matter expertise in both analytics and marketing, they can cover any knowledge gap in your team. In addition, they can strengthen your use of marketing analytics at a lower cost.

For example, a marketing analytics consultant could:

• Evaluate the data you’re currently collecting, define what you need to gain more useful insights and design a more effective process to collect, analyze and identify important trends or patterns.

• Uncover areas for improvement, streamlining and enabling more powerful analytics and insights.

• Establish a best practice approach for sharing usable insights from your analytics platform with your marketing team.

The marketing analytics consultant can help the CMO and marketing team make the connection between data and the bigger picture.

• Extract stories from your data and deliver them visually, making it easier for everyone to understand their impact.

• Help the CMO and marketing team make the connection between data and the bigger picture.

• Build a comprehensive platform that combines data from multiple sources, allowing your team to query and extract information across all datasets.

• Explain how users behave in social media and how they interact with your digital initiatives.

• Analyze new markets.

• Assess the competition.

• Determine the most effective marketing strategies.

• Define new marketing initiatives.

• Train your team to extract more valuable insights from your analytics platform.

These types of projects can help CMOs achieve greater success in virtually all of their marketing initiatives: social media, digital marketing, mobile marketing, customer relationship management and email marketing.

But, most important, engaging a marketing analytics consultant can help make better use of your customer data and transform your analytics into profitable marketing knowledge.