If you are the type of business owner who takes marketing seriously, then you may have already come across this challenge: “Does anyone else in your company know how to interpret insights from your marketing analytics?” You may need to impart this knowledge to your team, especially if you want to designate this task to a marketer or to a staff that can contribute to business decision-making. While you may opt to enroll them in training seminars or to hire marketing analytics professionals, teaching them yourself may be a good starting point or even a good way to minimize cost further.
Knowing Your Team and The Basics
You may have a team that is comprised of non-marketers but are willing to be trained to interpret marketing analytics, or even better, gather insights from it. We previously published a blog about how to train your team about basic marketing, which you can read .
In understanding marketing analytics, you will have to first ensure that your team is aware of the following fundamentals:
- Marketing is a specialization and thus requires knowledge of the basic concepts such as brand awareness, advertising, or social media marketing at least. This also entails being able to understand the metrics that you use for your marketing campaigns, such as ROI, Lead to Customer ratio, Revenue per Customer, Bounce Rates, etc.
- Marketing is a collaboration. It interacts with different departments, teams, and people. It is not an isolated practice, and it even demands inputs from customer-facing people, as well as from your customers themselves. It interacts with Sales, Customer Service, and Product Development, among others.
- Train team members that have the potential to be leaders. Even if data literacy and analytical thinking is not your team’s expertise, you should be focusing your efforts on team members who can recognize the value of data-driven efforts and campaigns.
Create A Data-Driven Workplace
Before you go into the nitty-gritty details of the components, tools, and metrics of marketing analytics, you should prepare your team’s mindset of accepting the digital marketing mindset. The first step to understanding how things work is to put them in a data-driven work environment.
To accomplish this and to proceed to orient them about marketing analytics, here are 5 tips on how to prepare your team:
1. A Central Source.
The first step is to have one central source of all your data. Everyone should be looking at the same reports, tables, and statistics. All your business systems should be integrated, with segregated access provided to each of your team members. The best method for this is to purchase software tools that are hosted on the cloud, which can be accessed on any of your workstations.
You can try out Maralytics, then sign-up for a free trial, here.
2. Strengthen Proficiency.
Make a list of all your significant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and give your team access to it. They can refer to it at any time to read up on it.
3. Do not just dump data. Asses and explain.
Make sure that you don’t overwhelm your team with data. Do not expect them to understand all in one session.
Avoid dumping heaps of information all at once hence, you don’t need to provide full access to your marketing analytics tools at first. Assess their readiness and should you decide to finally share, please spend time explaining what the data is all about, how it should be gathered, managed, and utilized.
If you are also worried about highly confidential data, you can provide modified access so that they only see what is relevant to their role. For example, you can set full-access, manager access, or employee access with different levels of authorizations.
4. Everything Is About Data.
It is now time to let your staff know that using marketing analytics means that they have to live and breathe it. This means that they should start integrating data in their daily work within the business. As much as possible, their decisions should now be backed by the insights formulated from the data gathered. All the data that have been gathered should not stay inside reports. They should be transformed into actions that are to be performed during the day-to-day operations of the business.
5. Only Get What Is Useful.
Data is now everything, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that all those data are relevant to your business. Your marketing analytics tool can gather vast amounts of data but only you and your team can figure out which ones are useful. Wading through all the data can take up your time and resources and if you reference the wrong numbers then it could also mean the failure of your campaigns. Avoid this by revisiting your business goals and objectives and by determining which metrics are truly significant to your needs.
Conclusion
Even if you’ve found the metrics that you and your team need, getting your staff to understand and to be proficient in marketing analytics doesn’t happen instantly. It will take time and it will prove to be a challenge for all of you. But know that you will reap substantial rewards if you develop a strong, data-driven mindset within the team that you trust the most in helping you manage and grow your business.
