What You're Missing Without Integrated Marketing Analytics

Introduction to Integrated Marketing Analytics

Microsoft, one of our larger clients, has several different marketing communications running simultaneously; they run paid online advertising, organic & paid search marketing as well as social media and content marketing programs, just to name a few!

But, as large of a company as Microsoft is, they used to lack a way to aggregate this data into one single analytics view.

Enter: Integrated Marketing Analytics So when you hear this sentence out loud ... We don't completely understand how our social media efforts affect our online advertising ... ... make sure to jump in and introduce the benefits of integrated analytics!

Current State of Marketing Analytics

How does your brand acquire paying customers & how is that revenue action being measured and analyzed?

There is no shortage of measurement tools readily available to measure this - but often times they don't integrate well together.

Examples of tools include:

• Measuring Paid Media: For paid media (online advertising), you can use web analytics platforms like WebTrends, Google Analytics or Omniture
• Measuring Owned Media: For measuring owned media (brand website), tools like Raven Tools or SEOmoz do a great job of measuring results
• Measuring Earned Media: For measuring earned media (social), you can use a listening tool like Radian6, Alterian SM2 or PeopleBrowser

However, our clients have helped identify a weak point in using these tools:

Everybody at our company is logging into their own tools & measuring their own insular analytics!

The social media director who looks at Radian6 will never dig in to WebTrends data because his job isn't to monitor site analytics; conversely, your site analytics person isn't keeping up with social media chatter surrounding your brand.

Each should care about the analytics of both avenues, because all the chatter they're working to promote is directed toward one central goal: REVENUE.

Benefits of Integrated Analytics

Marketing revenue is often generated from 3 main activities:

1. Paid Media
2. Owned Media
3. Earned Media

In our experience, marketing works harder for brands when the activities integrate & learn from other instead of functioning separately - a strategy that can only be measured with integrated analytics.

By placing an 'umbrella' over the top of your measurement tools and pulling those sources into an integrated view, you experience:

• Cost Savings: Instead of wasting financial resources by paying humans to integrate data in an analog fashion, invest in a tool that aggregates multiple data sources together for your team
• Increased Efficiency: Stop wasting resources on aggregating disparate data sources and focus on what  action steps  could be performed to improve marketing performance
• "Single Window" View: Empower your employees, from the C-suite down, to view marketing performance in one easy-to-consume location

Getting Started

We've introduced you to the concept of integrated marketing analytics, reviewed the current state of measurement & outlined the benefits received from investing in an integrated marketing analytics strategy.

So how do you get started?

Each brand is unique, but there are a few things to consider when investing in a solution like this:

• In-House or Outsource: Do you have the resources to build dashboards and, more importantly, analyze data & perform quality control checks on a regular basis?
• Tools: What tools do you need to integrate? Also, what tool will you use to integrate them (homegrown option vs a pre-built framework, like GoodData)?
• Success: How will your integrated marketing analytics journey be measured as a whole? Will you measure the ROI of the investment? Improved marketing results?

Next Stop: Integrated Analytics-ville!

In our next post, we'll discuss how to measure the return on investment of implementing an integrating marketing analytics plan within your organization.

In the meantime, we'll leave you with one of our favorite quotes from Nielsen Research Group founder Arthur Nielsen:

The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.

• Arthur Nielsen