• by Wayne St. Amand , Columnist, October 12, 2018

The digital age has not only altered how consumers behave, but it’s also made marketing extremely complex. TV and radio now work alongside digital marketing to reach and engage consumers. If marketers can’t get a holistic view of customers as they traverse multiple touchpoints and devices, then they can’t accurately measure the value of each experience or how well they’re moving them towards their desired success criteria.

Moreover, marketers need to shift budgets and strategy quickly in order to capitalize on changes in consumer behavior.

When marketers have the right measurement tools and practices in place, they can get to the root of performance problems faster and make adjustments to get back on track.

Here are two ways marketers can take their measurement — and their performance — to the next level:

Align metrics and teams around shared goals. Today, many marketing organizations operate in siloes split across products, brands, and/or channels. These individuals or teams typically work independently, often with their own outside agencies, and with their own set of metrics that they use to measure engagement, conversions and revenue. 

This siloed structure leads to fragmented, ineffective optimization by channel instead of across channels. When each channel has its own key performance indicators (KPIs), marketers can’t tell how they are working together to drive desired business outcomes.

To boost performance and enhance the consumer experience, marketing and management teams need to align on business objectives and the KPIs that track progress toward achieving them. 

Adopt a holistic approach. Siloed structures and channels have also made it much more difficult to track the entire consumer journey, and even harder to find out which touchpoints have the greatest impact. Marketers are forced to “stitch” together incomplete data sets in an effort to understand the efficacy of a particular tactic — digital or physical.

To maximize effectiveness, marketers need to consolidate all their audience and interaction data for a holistic view of performance. At the same time, different roles required different levels of insight, at different speeds, in order to be effective. 

Getting answers to these questions requires uniquely different analytic approaches and is the reason why different measurement tools, such as marketing mix modeling and multitouch attribution, are utilized today.

To get the most complete view of performance and provide each member of the team with access to the right level of insights, marketers should look for measurement solutions that combine the power of multiple modeling methodologies without compromising the accuracy or actionability of the insights produced. 

Shared goals and a holistic approach to measurement that’s geared toward achieving business outcomes enables marketers in all industries to tackle the daunting task of optimizing the results of their efforts, proving the value of marketing and the value of the team.