As marketing and technology evolves where should a one look to clean and centralize your marketing data? Marketer’s these days have an endless supply of tools and channels for display, email, social, online, offline, programmatic, not programmatic, a/b testing, TV, radio, trade shows, the list goes on and on. These channels are all great and companies will benefit if used, tracked and attributed correctly. Tracking and attribution is essential to any marketer, especially ones using the channels and tools mentioned above.
How do I track the all the tools and channels I’ve invested in?
Fortunately, with the rapid speed of technology development marketers can now track all channels, online and off with a single platform.
Pulling together, understanding and making decisions based on data have become more and more difficult as technology and techniques have advanced. One of the archaic ways we’ve gathered data has been through a scientific method call Microsoft Excel. This process is the equivalent of Fred Flintstone punching in and out of work at Slate’s Gravel Pit. What a pain it is to gather data from multiple platforms, people and even outside agencies only to put it into a spreadsheet and still have to formulate what the data is telling us. So now you’ve spent the last four days of the month trying to figure out what went on and if your tools and techniques worked. Oh, but wait! The agency you’re working with made an error in their reporting and needs another few days to send over the correct data. Now we’re on days five-seven and still do not have a full view of where our budgets went and what our ROI was, if any. If I hit a pain point, you’re not alone. This is a common occurrence in SMB’s all the way up to enterprise level companies.
If you’re like us, we love to be strategic about where we invest our time, energy and money. How can someone be strategic when 7 business days out of the month you’re chasing down data?