An article recently published in Forbes highlights the findings from a Economist Intelligence Unit report called “Outside looking in: The CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite”. The upshot is there is little agreement between CMOs and their fellow C-suiters about the former’s role and performance metrics. The problem, of course, is that disparate visions lead to confusion, not success.

Contributor Lisa Arthur, CMO at Aprimo, points out three major areas CMO’s need to address in 2013 to find and hang onto relevance among their C-suite colleagues. Would you be surprised to find that data and technology are at the core:

1. Data-driven marketing is critical to driving relevance
2. Most new investments will be focused around technology
3. Consistent, personalized, customer-centric marketing requires integration, collaboration and tech expertise

We’ve been talking about “Big Data” for quite a while and it looks like 2013 is the year technology will catch up and allow marketers to finally tap into power of all that data they’ve been collecting. After all, all the bits and bytes are no good if you can’t use them to understand your customers and deliver products, services, and offers that are relevant to them.

If there’s a bottom line to the article it comes back to the age-old challenge in marketing: Proving the value, i.e. revenue, of the investment in marketing. Getting a handle on the data and technology, and using the lessons learned to drive revenue will help COMs overcome the challenge and give them an equal seat at the C-level table.

Update: The report from EIU can be downloaded here.

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There is no doubt that data is driving digital marketing today and that the term “Bid Data” is the latest in a long line of “Big” cliches.  But an interesting thing has happened on the way to the utopia of data-driven decision making; most of us aren’t sure exactly what to do with what we have.  Two articles published less than a month apart by eMarketer illustrate the paradox.

The first, Online Data Collection Explodes Year Over Year in US, reports on the YOY explosion of data collection in the US, breaking it down by channel (see chart above) and the growth within each.  Calling the increases significant would be a certifiable understatement, and, at the same time, I don’t think anyone would be particularly surprised by the numbers.  After all, as our ability to collect data continues to increase, so too does the desire to get our hands on every possible byte.  What’s more surprising is that many digital marketers find most the data to be useless, as illustrated in the second eMarketer article.

Marketers Find Less than Half of Analytics Useful for Decision-Making flatly states:

According to research from Econsultancy and web analytics consultancy Lynchpin, a majority of marketers worldwide say that less than half of all the analytics data they collect is actually useful for decision-making. Just one in 10 companies thought a strong majority of analytics data was helpful, and less than a third said somewhere between half and three-quarters of all data was useful.

One of the great promises of the Internet is the ability to gather and analyze data, turning practice of analytics into a game-changer for businesses that embrace it.  Getting to that promised land, however, is a journey with several steps. Steps that include determining what data really are important to your business, or your functional area within the business.  What data will help you make the decisions necessary to deliver on your KPIs?  But with so much information pouring in on a daily basis, determining what is of value is, at best, exceptionally difficult.

Leveraging data is critical to success in digital marketing, but doing it right is even more so. In the coming months, we will explore the many facets of “Big Data”, it’s impact on digital marketing and how digital marketers can take advantage of information that’s buried within to drive financial improvements.

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How lucky are marketers today, what with all that wonderful data generated by, especially, their digital marketing efforts? It’s a veritable feast of numbers: impressions, CPC, CPL, CTR, etc., etc. So, what’s not to love about it? According to some companies, plenty.

eMarketer is out with a new study that shows that the biggest challenge facing companies, in terms of “Bid Data”, is “the time and manpower required to collect and analyze it.” The full chart of answers is below and it is almost a graphical representation of the throwing up of ones hands in a surrender to the issue at hand.

Now, we all understand the importance of data and we can all understand the frustration that comes when there is too much data to consider, but consider it we must. The key to success is how one goes about the task. For my purposes, I like to start at the most granular level possible – the DNA level, if you will – and build my understanding from there.

If you’re trying to make sense of, not to mention decisions based on, your entire digital marketing data set without first understanding the individual channels, you are setting yourself up for suboptimal performance. Put another way, it’s easier to take on the forest after you understand the individual trees.

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