We spotted a visualization published by MarketingCharts.com recently that is striking. They surveyed more than 200 marketers at major North American brands and asked, “if you had extra marketing budget, where would you invest it first?” They found that the leading response (more than double the next response) was to spend extra marketing budget on data analytics technology.
While this may come as a surprise to some, this conforms with what we are hearing from progressive marketing teams in the association and non-profit market. Business these days starts (and ends) with data. Most marketers will tell you they have enough (or too much) data and adding another system that is going to generate even more data is not going to help them. In fact, more data may just blur their vision of what they believe to be true and their path forward.
Instead, they want better means to organize and blend data together so they can eliminate the data silos that are preventing them from really knowing their members’ preferences and trends within segments of their membership. They want to be able to effectively segment their data, inspect data trends over time (something that can be achieved with data snapshotting), and identify insights in the data that can point to further action.
For example, we have a client who was having trouble renewing new members who were members of the association for less than four years. By being able to analyze blended data from their association management system (in particular – member tenure), posts in their private social community about what these new members were talking about, and reviewing the open/click trends of email content, the association was able to deduce what topics captivated this group of new members.
Marketers believe that by analyzing their data and performance, they can actually improve the performance of the marketing initiatives they have in place – Ad words, paid media, email, etc. Returning to the previous example, if an association has better insight into its data, it could more effectively target all their marketing initiatives – potentially lowering the cost and presumably improving the results.
From a marketer’s perspective, another marketing initiative or tool is great, but better insight into their data is divine.
