I spent part of today talking marketing analytics. As I consider the conversation, and analytics as a ’subset’ of the whole online marketing skillset, I think the time has come:
Seize analytics.
In the late 1990s, marketers realized that this Interweb thing might really be worth some energy, and seized control of web sites from corporate IT departments. Brochureware, replete with blink tags and bizarre animated GIFs, slowly evolved to real virtual brand presences. As bandwidth grew, so did the vision marketers attempted to achieve — collaboratively, in the best cases, with the very IT departments they once deposed.
Today, analytics is reaching a similar point, only rather than taking responsibility from IT mavens, marketers need to re-educate the mathematical gurus to look beyond the correlation to the humanity behind. Or, for that matter, get over the stereotypical ‘math is hard!’ mentality that seems to pervade marketing, and learn to run some analysis.
Data is more than numbers. Data tells stories. The very best online marketing analysis is about creating pictures and inferring motivation. The best analytics people spin data points into hypotheses — and ideas to prove or disprove them in ways that impact the bottom line. When your analytics people are too much into numbers, your marketing suffers for it, and you rely too much on reactive analytics, rather than creating paths via predictive analysis.
Some companies have started down this path by creating marketing personas to represent some of their clients, but from outside, it’s often hard to tell how much of the persona development is driven by or applied to their online metrics.
I think one of the great things about online marketing is the diversity of backgrounds you see among practitioners — everyone from social scientists to engineers, statisticians and linguists, and even people with degrees in classical literature whose parents always feared for their employability. It’s time to merge more of those disciplines and cease with silos. Analytics is a fine place to tear down some walls.