Chapter Two

2. Where Should You Start?

Which practices help companies run smarter marketing campaigns that will ultimately grow their business? What is the actual value of improving analytics capabilities? These are the central questions, because right now, the marketing industry offers countless resources and platforms. It can be nigh impossible to figure out how to invest your marketing money wisely. The impact of any particular investment seems unclear.

To help companies take concrete steps in their digital maturity, Google commissioned Boston Consulting Group to create the Mastering Digital Marketing Maturity research.8 In this research, they identified four stages of digital maturity. Briefly, they are:

• Nascent. A nascent organization is very media focused, with a “campaign by campaign” level of thinking: “We need to grow our business. Let’s run a YouTube ad.” At this stage, companies mainly use external data and one-to-one buys. Since they often lack a full picture of their analytics data, they tend to think in isolated terms. They don’t have enterprise analytics, so they just run individual campaigns to reach target numbers they’ve set, such as cost per click.
• Emerging. In the emerging phase, companies are beginning to think less about solving all of their problems through media and more about analytics tools. They’ve started using their own data instead of relying fully on media partners. With their own data, they are beginning to automate some of their marketing processes, using specific audiences and remarketing to combine media with tech stacks like Analytics 360 or Adobe Analytics. These platforms are allowing them to reach targeted audiences more efficiently and effectively. The company is beginning to understand analytics, combining third-party data with first-party data.
• Connected. This stage represents a big leap for an organization. They have finally begun to focus on and integrate data, bringing together all of the various data silos, such as marketing, analytics, and CRM, to drive ROI from a single customer point of view. This single customer point of view allows them to create more personalized campaigns, as the company begins connecting the dots to create a solid digital analytics foundation. Nevertheless, many connected companies continue to think on a quarter-by-quarter or campaign-level basis. This short-term thinking creates an ongoing hindrance.
• Multi-Moment. It’s at the fourth and final stage of maturity that a company truly becomes an analytics machine. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is taken into consideration when segmenting and targeting customers, so marketing decisions are optimized and personalized at a one-to-one level. A multi-moment company has data scientists combing through millions of customer records, putting them into different cohorts, then migrating that data back into an enterprise analytics stack, which enables the organization to buy media, targeted differently toward high-value, medium-value, and low-value customers. As it turns out, the top 10 to 20 percent of customers drive most of the value for an organization, so a multi-moment enterprise spends a lot more on those customers.9 They are able to do this because they have a clear, well-rounded, end-to-end understanding of who those customers are, and the lifetime value they bring to the company.

A New Framework for Maturity: The 6 Ps

Everyone wants to jump immediately from nascent to multi-moment, but again, optimizing your marketing analytics is a journey. Sometimes, you have to crawl or walk, making consistent improvements over a long period of time, before you can run.

When new partners come to InfoTrust for help, particularly large multinational corporations, they’re often under pressure and have a long list of objectives. “We need you to fix our analytics. Then we need you to help us fix our media. Then we need you to help us fix our marketing stack so we can improve our marketing activities. And we need you to do it all fast!” They might list thirty-seven different objectives, and then they ask for a price quote, but they expect all of these things to get fixed within a couple of months.

However, as we studied this journey, we realized that moving from one maturity stage to the next requires some specific components to fall into place. Boston Consulting Group has done an excellent job at defining each stage, but we needed a mechanism to help people move from one stage to the next. So, we decided to make a framework of our own. Think of it this way: BCG gives you the treasure map, but you still need the right ship, crew, and resources to follow the map to the treasure. We built a vehicle to do just that.

We call it the 6 Ps of Digital Analytics Transformation.

Maybe you’re spending a lot on digital marketing and not getting results. Maybe you’re struggling to understand the wants and needs of your high-value customers. Or maybe you’re just looking to improve marketing.

Where do you start?

Simple. You start with purpose.

Start with Purpose

Why do you want to become a better marketer? More specifically, in what way do you want to become a better marketer?

A few years ago, Facebook acquired Instagram, and then they acquired WhatsApp. In both instances, new tools allowed them to fulfill specific marketing needs. Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had a vision for the company to become entirely mobile focused, providing an amazing mobile experience. Data had revealed that more and more of his customers were moving in that direction, and so, with a specific purpose in mind, the company acquired the right tools and began delivering that experience.

If you lack a clear purpose, you will simply begin acquiring tools without optimizing them, creating a kind of Frankenstein monster that doesn’t do much to deliver a better customer experience. At every stage prior to multi-moment, companies tend to be obsessed with simply acquiring and integrating more tools and platforms, but first, they need to start honing in on their why. Their purpose needs to become intuitive.

• Who is their customer?
• What does the customer expect from them?
• How can analytics help them deliver on those expectations?

People, Platforms, and Process

Once you understand your purpose, you can move from why to how. There are three basic levers of execution: people, platforms, and process. First, let’s look at people. Even the best platforms need knowledgeable people to use them effectively, so upscaling your education and building the right team is the best investment your organization can make.

Avinash Kaushik, bestselling author and digital marketing evangelist, famously said that 90 percent of your budget should be used on people and only 10 percent on solutions.10 In most organizations, these numbers are reversed. It’s so easy to buy a new platform, and the number of options out there is breathtaking. All of these products promise better targeting, better cohort analysis, and so much more, but if you don’t have the right people using those products, you’re throwing money away.

It is very easy to fail on the people side of your organization. On your team, you need a business architect who understands how to use your analytics products effectively, and you also need a technical architect who understands how data flows between your platforms. This powerful combination ensures you get the most out of your products, while also avoiding manual inefficiencies. You might be attracted to the shiny new analytics tool, but you need people who are dedicated to any tool you implement in...