4 Common Issues with Marketing Performance Management & Solutions

In the current age, marketing is not only an art but also a science. As such, measuring the performance of your marketing efforts against key metrics is a top priority for every marketer. Without rigorous performance tracking, marketing is reduced to mere guesswork. This is because you don’t know what marketing activities are worth investing in and those that are best left alone.

Marketing performance management allows enterprises to strategically plan marketing activities, assess their impact, and make better marketing decisions. They can analyze data, make predictions, and optimize marketing campaigns and resources. Businesses that use marketing performance management solutions report benefits such as aligning marketing performance to predefined goals, spending optimization, greater accountability, and data inclusivity.  

Regrettably, numerous businesses struggle with marketing performance management and hence fail to harness its benefits. They have incomplete and inaccurate datasets that they cannot leverage to optimize marketing endeavors. Continue reading to learn four common issues with marketing performance management and how business intelligence solutions like ClicData address them.

4 Common Issues with Marketing Performance Management

Issue #1: Hard to Combine Data from Multiple Sources

Data is a valuable asset for marketers. 64% of marketing executives agree that data-driven marketing is vital to success in an increasingly competitive global economy.

Data allows you to gain insights into customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. Also, it is fundamental for measuring marketing performance. Unfortunately, too much data, especially when it comes from distinct sources, is problematic.

Marketers obtain data from multiple sources ranging from websites to landing page forms, sales records, marketing records, purchase point records, and social media advertising. Imagine having a customer’s name and contact data written in 10 different ways by 10 different people, in 10 different repositories. Combining this data can be daunting and strenuous. 

Consider using a Digital Assets Management solution, which creates a single source of truth for your marketing materials (images, videos, infographics) by providing you an easy way to look for these assets, share them, and maintain all revisions in order.

Among the challenges of multiple data sources in marketing reporting include:

• They make data integration challenging since the sources don’t talk to each other.
• They cause data quality concerns. You cannot guarantee the quality of the data.
• You cannot derive meaningful insights from multiple data sources.

Issue #2: The Nightmare of Manual Data Cleansing

Since data is a valuable asset for enterprises, inaccurate data can be detrimental. It can compromise the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and thwart decision-making. Research shows that erroneous data costs American companies more than $3 trillion annually.

Luckily, data cleansing corrects inaccurate and incomplete data. Data cleansing offers significant business value, such as boosting customer acquisition efforts, improving decision-making, enhancing productivity, and increasing revenue.

A good number of Marketing Professionals use Excel to cleanse their data and rely on these new datasets to manage their marketing performance. But manual data cleansing is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone. Errors are expensive, take time to rectify, and can damage your brand’s reputation. Also, manually scrubbing data using Excel leads to a broad range of issues, including inaccuracies, redundancies, security issues, and difficulty adding new data sources.

Issue #3: The Unbreakable Data Silos

Data silos are a group of data that is accessible to a group of people but not to others.

Data silos cost you time, effort, and money. They are a huge blocker for decision-making and inhibit business growth. Many marketing performance management solutions have data silos that create a less collaborative environment, jeopardize data accuracy, and hurt productivity. Also, data silos waste storage space while increasing storage costs.

In some cases, it makes sense to maintain data silos for security reasons – your marketing department doesn’t need to see and access your logistics department’s data. But in some cases, your company will benefit from taking down that wall. Marketing and sales departments need to have access to the same data to measure the performance of their leads, for example.

With data silos between sales and marketing, there is no strategy alignment, which harms performance. In an article titled ‘why silos are the enemy of effective marketing,’ the author contends that marketing and sales teams must break down silos and collaborate across functions to offer customers the best possible experience.

Issue #4: Non-Automated Reporting

Non-automated reporting is a substantial problem in marketing performance management. It is not only time-consuming and laborious but also creates room for costly errors and data integration problems. Also, non-automated reports lack anticipation when data deviates.

However, with automated reporting, you save time, improve accuracy, attain great efficiency, and concentrate on core marketing activities. 

Using Business Intelligence to Fix your Marketing Performance Management

With an all-in-one data management and visualization platform like ClicData, you can tackle your marketing performance management issues. ClicData is a business intelligence solution for managing and analyzing data beautifully. Here are four primary reasons you should use ClicData for your marketing performance management.   

Reason #1: Create a Single Version of the Truth

As mentioned earlier, data silos can harm your marketing efforts and business as a whole. As such, you need to break these silos by connecting data from marketing and sales systems. ClicData serves as a single version of the truth, making business intelligence simpler and accessible. Consequently, you can make better strategic and operational decisions.

Reason #2: Fewer Errors when Processing Data

Say goodbye to manual data cleansing and analysis and using Excel. While Excel is a good data management tool, it is error-prone. A simple copy/paste can be costly for your business. ClicData has visual ETL tools that combine, merge and clean data. Hence, you get fewer errors and increase your data’s credibility. 

Reason #3: Fresh Data for Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere

ClicData lets you stay on top of your business performance with automated data refresh. You can refresh your data whenever you want — daily, weekly, or monthly. Luckily, you need to set it up once and get fresh data anytime.

Also, you can access your business intelligence anywhere anytime from any device. Use TV screens during meetings, laptops at the office, and smartphone or tablet during the commute. 

Reason #4: Faster Decision-making

2 in 3 marketers affirm that data-driven decisions are more effective than gut instincts. As such, predictive marketing that leverages data analytics is crucial in decision-making. With ClicData, you prevent data deviation, anticipate drops in essential KPIs, and build a data-driven culture in your team.

The Takeaway

Marketing performance management can be daunting and strenuous. However, ClicData makes it seamless by reducing data processing errors, acting as a single version of the truth, and promoting faster decision-making.

Book a call with us to identify how we can help you improve your marketing performance management. We can walk with you at each stage of the way and make sure you get the most of the marketing data and better manage your team.

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