Our resident measurement mentor Kennedy Lynn looks at the rise of big data in today’s digital world,

As a marketing manager, your company’s stakeholders and business leaders will ask you the question “how much revenue is our marketing generating?”. For eCommerce businesses this question can be answered by the fairly simple process of calculating overall net profit of online sales and dividing that by overall marketing investment to produce the ROI. However, for businesses who complete sales offline, measuring marketing can be a bit more difficult. In the asset management industry marketing managers have expressed that measuring marketing is not as straight forward as they would like. It is crucial to know how to measure your marketing performance and understand what “good” marketing looks like for further business development.

In today’s highly digital world, CMOs and business leaders have seen the value in investing in data teams who can use big data to develop deeper marketing insight. Whether you are trying to improve your email campaign performance, optimise social media engagement, understand your website visitors or improve brand visibility, big data has proven to be an essential part of business.

What is ‘Big Data’?

Big data refers to extremely large data sets that may be analysed to reveal trends, patterns, and information that lead to better decision-making processes. Although having a vast amount of data won’t automatically allow you to achieve your marketing goals, the potential is there. The insights derived from the data are what allow you to understand if your marketing efforts are effective and beneficial to your company. Measuring your marketing performance enables you to react to the findings and develop specific strategies and make decisions that will drive growth.

Where to start?

As a marketing manager you may be asking yourself ‘how do I begin measuring my marketing performance with big data?’. Gathering data certainly comes with its challenges.

Firstly, you need to answer the questions ‘which KPIs do I want to measure?’ and ‘what outcome do I want to achieve by measuring these KPIs?’ (KPIs are key performance indicators – quantifiable data points that help you track or measure success).

Secondly, your data team (including data engineers and analysts) will need to leverage cloud technology to curate and store raw data relevant to your KPIs.

 Finally, your data team must clean, process, and analyse the raw data to develop useful insight on what the data means and how the insight will be useful to achieve your marketing objectives.

Working smarter, not harder

While this above process may not show it, all of these steps are fairly time-consuming and can require specific knowledge of various software to carry out properly.

Fortunately, there are alternatives that make measuring marketing performance significantly easier. White Marble Marketing offers an innovative SaaS product called Beacon, that is backed by a data team who specialise in curating big data and developing useful insights across various KPIs. Beacon KPIs include, but are not limited to,:

  • measuring website visits by device
  • website traffic sources
  • website engagement
  • search visibility
  • social media activity and engagement
  • website quality including page speed
  • email performance

Beacon members not only gain access to your own data across the KPIs mentioned but you will also be able to view all competitor data in the Beacon peer group. The current peer group consists of a marketing community made up of 14 companies (and growing!) in the asset management industry working together to improve overall industry performance. Beacon allows you to benchmark your marketing KPIs against those within the peer group to give you a holistic view of the marketing standards within your sector.

To learn more about Beacon or get in contact with our team.