The smart CMO’s guide to building a marketing analytics tool stack

The expanding role of the modern CMO presents a challenge for many organizations. Along with traditional duties, CMOs now have to drive predictable growth by taking responsibility for sales strategies, marketing campaigns and technology deployments. The new environment requires data-driven decision-making using a marketing analytics stack that can uncover hidden value while measuring real-time performance from your experience designs.  

Marketing analytics tools allow CMOs to use facts and metrics when making strategic decisions for the business. It may include when to run a promotion, how to target high-value customers or even help determine the exact price point that will grow revenues over the medium term. Building a marketing analytics stack that covers every variable is possible, but many CMOs struggle with knowing where to start. 

This blog will guide you through building a marketing analytics stack that supports your data-driven decision-making strategy while also avoiding a data avalanche in the process. 

Key takeaways:

• The role of the modern CMO is changing, requiring executives and marketing teams to make decisions rapidly and grow revenues consistently

• Marketing data analytics can help uncover hidden potential and avoid pitfalls while making the organization respond effectively to shifting marketing efforts

• Marketing analytics tools should cover all business operations including your customer-facing teams and backend processes that support the business

• Adopting a data-driven decision-making process depends on your marketing analytics platform and developing a single source of truth for all business information

How to adopt data-driven decision-making using a modern marketing analytics stack

Marketing analytics tools enable CMOs to demonstrate the correlation between a specific strategy and the organization’s bottom line. Even if executives interact with data every day, some surveys suggest that many still prefer to make gut decisions or rely on intuition when setting strategies for digital marketing. 

The issue with this approach is:

• You fail to capitalize on emerging market opportunities

• You’re focusing on the wrong areas when analyzing your performance

• There’s a tendency to reduce the data sets to match your own perspectives

• Strategies aren’t aligned with your customers, leading to friction when designing new experiences

• Inherent biases are costing you money with data-driven firms being 6% more profitable and 5% more productive than those who go with their gut

For CMOs who need to adopt a marketing analytics stack and improve data-driven decision-making in your business, below we discuss three steps you can take to improve your strategy.

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1. Select your marketing analytics tools based on your goals

While data-driven decision-making is good, you’ll want to gather data that helps you gain holistic insights and granular performance regarding your campaigns. Analytics can originate from a range of different areas that teams interact with every day, including advertising, SEO, customer support and satisfaction tools. 

Choosing what data should inform which decisions isn’t easy, as each dataset can add value to your strategies or steer you in the wrong direction. Building a data culture is only viable if you understand the underlying wants and needs of your customers. 

Experimentation with different strategies is the best way to uncover the true value of your data. When deciding on which tools to implement, consider those that can connect analytics to actions. A customer-centric analysis is the best way to support your business strategy. 

This may include:

• Using a digital experience platform (DXP) to test out your campaigns and journeys regularly

• Tracking user behavior as part of the buying journey to identify all friction points

• Avoid creating data silos and rigid rules by using a flexible marketing analytics stack that covers the entire organization’s operations

You should also look for marketing analytics tools that speed up the feedback loop by integrating directly with your analytics and reporting solutions. If you need to spend hours harmonizing datasets before bringing them into your analytics engine, it may make your approach unsustainable – especially when scaling operations. 

2. Look for tools that are easy to integrate

Your data will come from direct sources like your ecommerce site but will also need information about backend processes. A marketing analytics stack should be easy to integrate and allow you to consolidate multiple datasets into a single source of truth. 

Develop a customer data platform (CDP) framework to categorize, aggregate and consolidate data from all your line of business (LOB) applications. 

Consider datasets from LOB systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP), point of sale (POS), ecommerce platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) and email or other marketing platforms. Prioritize datasets according to use cases so you can consolidate everything into a data warehouse before passing it to your analytics engine. Finally, use business intelligence (BI) to graphically represent the data and help you visualize hidden value within the organization. 

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3. Experiment with your marketing analytics implementation

Understand that your performance will evolve with your customers. You’ll need to revisit your analytics tools and review the efficacy just like you do with your customer journeys and marketing campaigns. 

Include considerations such as pricing sensitivity, value perception, customer interactions and any other valuable metric in your analysis. Consolidating your marketing analytics processes into a DXP that streamlines the entire delivery, design and analysis environment is the best way to stay on top of shifting market trends. 

A DXP solution will enable you to:

• Test out your content delivery strategies and measure customer reception

• Adjust your strategy incrementally to avoid making major blunders in your strategic business decisions

• Identify the main pain and friction points that are limiting growth and stifling revenues

• Provide a single source of truth for all your business data in a manageable, efficient environment

Leverage your business information for data-driven decision-making with Optimizely

Optimizely provides businesses with a comprehensive set of analytics tools to make data-driven decision-making a part of your organizational culture. Basing all your marketing and product decisions on actionable insights will help your company grow and outpace your competitors without resorting to guesswork. 

To see how Optimizely can help your organization embrace a data-centric culture that supports your customers, request a demo today.