Over the last 3 months we have had numerous conversations with marketers, aligned to both brands and agencies, about helping them improve their reporting. Now when it comes to marketing and reporting there is no shortage of opinions. And they are all pretty similar. They all insist, forecast, predict and generally suggest that a ‘modern marketer’ must make use of the data available to drive better insight into customer and prospect behaviour.

To list but a few…

• 5 Ways Big Data Will Change Sales and Marketing in 2015
• New Report Shows Data-Driven Marketing Drives Customer Engagement & Market Growth
• The Modern Marketer, Data & Analytics and the Future of Digital
• The secret to modern marketing is data
• Data Advice for the Modern Marketer
• Why You Need To Be A Modern Marketer

Trust me. The list goes on…

Which is great. But very few actually tell you (or the modern marketer) how to go about it. Sure, anyone can go out and slap in a basic reporting or dashboard solution. And then you have pretty pictures which show you how many clicks you’ve had, how many visitors you’ve had to your website, how many opens you’ve had on your emails, what your CTR is and what your PPC rate is. In fact, a lot of marketing automation solutions include these sorts of basic metrics.

But no one tells you how to aggregate data from a multichannel campaign across social, web, tv, radio, out-of-home (think buses, billboards etc), print and the rest. Let alone how to determine the business impact of a multichannel campaign. i.e. what is happening to sales or revenue while the campaign is in market?

What we found is that there are a whole stack of marketers out there that are quickly turning into Excel gurus because they’re taking data from places like Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Twitter, LinkedIn and external systems like POS systems, CRM systems to try and put together meaningful reports. They’re trying to move beyond the operational reporting of ‘We had 10 million visitors to our landing page yesterday’ to determining business impact such as ‘We had a 47% increase to the landing page for our autumn sale and sales increased by 21%.’

But they’re getting bogged down in trying to put it all together. And if you feel sorry for them, what about the agency marketers that have to provide detailed analysis to not just one task master but many? When you’re juggling multiple clients the complexity can increase exponentially!

Where am I going with all this? While everyone agrees that the ‘modern marketer’ needs to use data to gain insight not many articulate the breakdown of the problems in the way. Namely:

1. Sort out the data
2. Sort out the reporting

Now while this might sound like common sense it’s easy to see why people gloss over point #1. I can almost guarantee that if you talk to any salesperson that wants to sell you an analytics solution they will wax lyrical on how their solution can connect to multiple data sources. What they don’t tell you is that an analytics solution is not geared to cleansing your data, mapping your data, applying relevant business rules, automatically determining and applying geo-location data. That is the field of a data aggregation or data warehouse tool. And so if you’re not used to dealing with this sort of complexity it’s not hard to be taken in by the charming salesman and think everything will be fine. Only to discover it’s not.

And so what we found is that marketers are dealing with more than their fair share of complexity when it comes to trying to put together meaningful reports let alone insightful analytics. From our experience marketers are dealing with at 3 x the number of data sources that other parts of a business normally would. Which normally means they have 10 x the headache…

And in trying to work out how best to resolve this data issue, because it needs to be solved before you can even think about reporting, we stumbled across ChannelMix.

ChannelMix is the only purpose built marketing data aggregation platform that will allow you to take data related to social, web, print, OOH, TV, radio, direct mail, email, search, CRM, POS, customer loyalty and more aggregate it, cleanse it, apply your business rules and get ready to determine what impact your marketing activities are having from a business perspective. And how do you do that? ChannelMix is purpose built to use Tableau, the leading data visualisation tool, to help marketers derive the insights that everyone is telling them they need to derive.

We’re excited to announce that saasall is the exclusive reseller of ChannelMix in the Australasian market and as a Tableau reseller we are uniquely positioned to help marketers from both brands and agencies get to grips with their data and start driving insight.

To learn more get in touch – hi@saasall.com.

Or check out our ChannelMix + Tableau Starter Package. Everything you need to get going for less than $10k.

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