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The first thing to know about choosing a new DSP—is that you need more than just a DSP. We know the idea of transitioning to a new digital media platform can be very intimidating. There’s an incredibly daunting process of direct and programmatic integration, media convergence, and many other moving pieces. Where and how do you start? Below, review the evaluation process to ensure a solid and confident investment that will meet the expanding needs of your organization, now and into the future.
Know your “why.” Why? Setting business goals and looking at the big picture will allow you to see where there is room for improvement down the road.
Ensure buy-in from the executive team and stakeholders. Break it all down—education may be needed to help company executives, shareholders, and members of your tactical team understand the reason(s) for this large transition, as direct and programmatic integration is no small feat. Educate yourself about the entire process first, so you’re able to answer their questions to the best of your ability. Also, identify the questions you aren’t sure of to come back to at a later date.
As mentioned, you need more than just a programmatic buying platform. Determine the components that are critical to your business, by identifying the specific initiatives and goals the platform will need to support. Assign a project manager to track progress, tasks, and deadlines.
Arm your team and stakeholders with the necessary considerations and questions needed to craft a well-thought-out Request for Information (RFI) or Request for Proposal (RFP). Our Digital Marketer’s Guide to Choosing a DSP takes you through the entire evaluation process and is chock-full of questions to ask potential vendors.
What are you waiting for? Get started today!
Whether it’s enhancing Basis’ capabilities, creating educational resources, or providing Raving Fan Service, Centro is always working to help your organization grow and succeed.
New updates. Every week.
Did you know that we update Basis every week? From an enhanced dashboard to smaller design improvements, our technology team is constantly finding creative ways to improve your experience with Basis.
They also connect you with partners to increase the options you have for building tactics. This year we:
All our 2020 features and integrations can be reviewed at BasisUpdates.net (there’s a lot!)
When the world changed, so did we.
Our award-winning training program Centro Certified went fully virtual this year. The best part? 652 participants across North America, South America and Europe have been able to join us to learn as a group. You can boost your knowledge of the media space by registering in one of our courses:
The Centro Institute also offers on-demand education. Our monthly webinars feature industry experts that give us their perspective on topics such as:
These, and many others, can be viewed anytime on our website.
Providing Raving Fan Service is in our DNA.
If you aren’t raving about our people and our products, we have not achieved the level of customer happiness for which we strive. There are over 400 Centrons dedicated to helping you maximize your experience with Basis and navigate the complexities of digital media.
Acting as your digital advocate, your CSM and Account Lead work to understand your requirements and priorities, make sure both are being met, and provide seamless communication and connection between you and Centro. Many of the enhancements and programs we create result from conversations with our clients: your needs and ideas are our priority!
We aren't done yet.
2020 isn’t over, and in the next months you can expect to see visual changes implemented to make Basis more interactive, new partners added for campaign targeting, and more stimulating conversations published for you to tune in.
Always evolving. Always innovating. For you.
Digital marketing activities don’t just play out on one channel. From advertising publishers and social management tools to mobile analytics portals and call tracking solutions, the modern marketing organization is tasked with juggling a matrix of disparate systems to map and refine their customers’ increasingly complex paths to purchase. With the number of marketing avenues open to businesses continuing to grow exponentially, the predominant challenge facing marketers is managing the sheer volume of data they are collecting via these siloed platforms. The success of any marketing strategy today has thereby become hinged on being able to effectively track and report on all this data to uncover how every channel is working in harmony to drive revenue.
That is where marketing dashboards come in, replete with all the mechanisms needed to empower marketing teams to turn a pile of fragmented statistics into dynamic visualizations that offer an interconnected overview of how marketing investments pay off. Dashboards have the power to tell countless different stories, and consequently how they are modeled and displayed will depend entirely on the role of the user. Digital analysts and those more closely involved with the day-to-day management of data should place a focus on visual aids that drill down into recent performance over short time periods. A marketing executive, by contrast, will be primarily concerned with big picture trends and analyses, as opposed to the intricacies of how campaign X performed on channel Y. “How much have we been investing? Where have we been investing? How does that compare to our budget planning?” These are the questions a Chief Marketing Officer will want answered in a dashboard.
This blog post highlights five dashboard components essential specifically to marketing leaders. Collectively, the snapshots depicted here provide the high-level data a decision-maker needs to measure campaign efficacy quickly and ultimately determine strategic objectives moving forward.
Overview:
Dashboards need to tell a story. This component does that both immediately and effectively. By headlining the dashboard with this succinct executive summary against high-level goals, CMOs can identify within the first 10 seconds of viewing whether something is amiss. These metrics quantify the overall impact that an organization’s marketing approach is having on their market and illustrate if there is a need to scrutinize particular areas of their program more acutely. These numbers inherently only demonstrate value if the data is recognizable to the user and they know what to expect. “By now, I anticipated having spent 2.48 million and therefore this makes sense. However, I was forecasting a ROAS of 650% and we’re noticeably short of that. Why?” Quick, penetrating insights are what this visual aid is designed to induce.
Overview:
Pictures equal a thousand words, and that should certainly be true for CMO dashboards. While the headlining component above details the hard-core marketing metrics in aggregate, these eight simple visualizations handily break down those numbers to showcase how each channel is performing independently. For businesses and CMOs to continually outpace their competition, marketing teams need to be driving replicable growth month-in and month-out. Boosting revenues and profits relies on a constant process of identifying areas for optimization across marketing channels and swiftly responding to market movements. This component empowers marketing executives with the information they need to do just that.
Looking at the charts, one can observe that spending is at similar levels on both Facebook and Microsoft ads, yet revenue and conversions are both higher on the social channel. Seeing this, a CMO can then instruct their team to assign more budget to Facebook and monitor how the change in approach works out. That’s ultimately the nature of the information an executive can extract here: big picture trends for the year to date. Utilizing stacked charts - with the total value at the top and the breakdown in between - is particularly valuable in this context as they fluently expose swings and smooth progression from one month to the next as opposed to displaying each channel’s performance individually as distinct entities.
Overview:
Data by itself can be incredibly dry, and it is the job of a dashboard to bring numbers to life. This dynamic line graph unpinned from zero is a great example of that. It’s a visual aid built without a y-axis to highlight that the most important piece of insight here is the correlation between efficiency metrics rather than the actual value themselves. This chart is not modeled to reveal whether you’re hitting your CPA goal, for example - that data is in the headline component - but instead what the overall trends are in terms of relationship to one another over the course of the year.
Driving efficiency is shaping up to become the top priority for CMOs over the next few years. In a recent study titled The Modern CMO conducted by Forbes Insights, it was found that 46% of CMOs named efficiency as being top of mind. The study - which surveyed more than 200 CMOs in global companies - revealed that efficiency was more significant than other areas of marketing including customer experience, brand awareness, investing in technology, reaching younger generations, and global expansion. With CEOs progressively looking to marketing chiefs to connect investment to revenue and enterprise value, showcasing consistent improvement across these efficiency metrics is going to become table stakes for marketing teams. It is vital, therefore, that CMOs have a pulse on how they are swinging and shifting.
Overview:
CMOs are directly accountable for marketing performance and so they must be able to demonstrate clearly where budgets are being spent. With marketing campaigns today more multifaceted than ever before, these pie charts and stacked bar charts provide a birds-eye view of how a strategy is evolving and how an investment portfolio breaks down. If one publisher begins trending against expectations, or if certain investment criteria are not being met, these visualizations will expose that and afford marketing teams the opportunity to rectify the problems before they escalate.
Overview:
The goals of digital marketing teams vary significantly from company to company, but what unites them all is a desire to make the most of every single dollar they invest. To understand how strategies are unfolding, CMOs are principally looking at their Cost per Acquisition and Return on Ad Spend; two metrics that are critical in determining campaign health and authority. These two line graphs together offer a baseline of how CPA and ROAS measure up on each channel and essentially communicate what’s working and what isn’t in terms of advertising spend. Marketing leaders armed with this information are then empowered to design a more robust investment blueprint that doubles down on the most lucrative advertising outlets and iterates on the others accordingly to drive improved outcomes.
The most effective CMO dashboards simultaneously answer executive-level questions about performance, tell a logical story, convey a hierarchy of priority, simplify comparisons, and avoid reporting overload. Their fundamental objective is to provide a CMO with the data required to make smart decisions, course correct, and improve planning and forecasting for the months and quarters ahead.
Recent numbers by Statista show that the average person consumes upwards of 5 hours and 57 minutes of video content per day. There’s no doubt about it, we are watching more videos and spending more time screens—and there are no signs of slowing down. In fact, by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic – 15x higher than it was in 2017 (Cisco, 2020). So why not tap into this growing advertising opportunity? In order to hit your key consumers, it's crucial to understand the basics of the digital video advertising landscape, as well as four essential video ad formats.
Review a quick list of basic terms every marketer must know in order to master digital video advertising in 2020:
In-Stream: The ad format most commonly connected to digital video and similar to a TV commercial viewing experience. It is often used synonymously with pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll.
Interstitial: Particularly popular in the mobile space, these units most frequently appear in-app and are served between app activities or gameplay. On desktop environments, they appear between page loads. These units will typically have a countdown or the ability to skip the video ad after a few seconds.
In-Banner: Served in IAB standard display sizes on a website, most commonly 300x250. The pricing for these units is more in line with static banners or rich media formats.
In-Feed: typically, the video ad will begin once a user scrolls to the placement within a web content feed online or within a mobile device. This format can also go by the name out-stream, in-page, or in-article, depending on the publisher partner.
Pre-roll: A video ad unit that runs in-stream before video content or as an interstitial ad.
Mid-roll: A video ad unit that runs during video content within a video player environment.
Post-roll: A video ad unit that runs after video content within a video player environment.
Reach your desired audience at the right time and the right place with video advertising. Video ad campaigns powered by Basis by Centro can scale and streamline content creation and distribution, and ad campaign analytics. Centro's experts are here to help!
Retargeting need not be merely a tactic for B2C companies to reach consumers. Done right, it can be an incredibly effective way to reach future clients, as long as you combine the right retargeting tactics with strong and tailored messaging.
To illustrate the effectiveness of B2B retargeting, I want to call attention to a case study on an insurance client of Centro’s. What this example illustrates is that if you know your audience, pay close attention to the right benchmarks, and are willing to test a number of approaches, retargeting can work very well in a B2B context.
Overview
For this insurance company, Centro ran a two-month campaign whose initial objective was to target small business owners and decision-makers interested in purchasing small business insurance. The primary objective was to increase applications and, in turn, boost its lead generation effort, while recognizing a positive ROI.
We had a few challenges to address out of the gate. First, the client historically had seen a fairly long pathway to conversion, including a large number of site visitors who would start, but not complete, the application for insurance. They held us to a relatively challenging CPA benchmark. Since this was the very first Centro campaign for the client, we had no historical data to use in for campaign optimization.
Strategy
Setting up the insurance company’s first campaign with Centro meant we were to build a user pool to increase the scale we’d get with retargeting small business owners. We also tested multiple data and content partners right out of the gate to improve efficiency, gain insights and increase scale. Specific campaign approaches included:
Results
Due to Centro DSP’s multiple integrations with data and content providers, and its ability to create tiered retargeting through advanced pixeling strategies, we were able to target application starters more aggressively to come in at about one-half the client's cost-per-action goal, with strong overall numbers.
As a result, the insurance company expanded its retargeting efforts considerably, extending into multiple, specific small business industry campaigns and testing a variety of messages against each audience.
Learn more about retargeting with Centro.
From the revolutionary Tasty videos to the recent roll-out of Instagram TV (IGTV), video as a social media marketing tactic has become, “the new black.” The mad rush of businesses incorporating video advertising into their digital marketing and advertising strategies may have you in a panic, but before you dump a ton of dollars into video advertising production, take a step back. It’s best to approach social video marketing with a cool and collected mentality. Dive into these tips to determine how you can incorporate video advertising into your digital strategy.
1. Know your audience
Knowing your audience is a key piece in any marketing plan. Establishing your target audience early on will help you determine what type of content to plan and post later. Whether you’re implementing video ads or still imagery, make sure it’s relevant to your target audience and true to your brand. Stick to useful, engaging content, that doesn’t stray from your brand’s look and feel. Consistency is key.
Make sure your visuals compliment post copy. For example, if you are promoting a blog post about technology trends, a cat picture for the header image probably isn’t the best idea. When the post copy and visual element are related, it ensures success and avoids confusion in the long-run.
If you decide to use video advertising to promote a blog post, or explain a product, try to not give everything away at first glance. The point of creating a video ad or using a captivating image is to encourage people to click through to your website or landing page. If you tell the viewer everything they need to know in one sitting, the chances of holding their attention after the video ends are slim-to-none. Images and videos can be the first point of contact with your potential new customer. Keep them coming back for more!
2. Images should still have a place in your heart—and on your feed
The heavy focus on video these days almost makes still images seem like the MySpace of content—outdated and obsolete. Know that not everything on your feed needs to be video. Still images also play an important role when it comes to visual communication. In order to create a balanced strategy, it is important to recognize that some content lends itself to video advertising, while other content is more enticing with the use of an enhanced image. Informational videos are a great way to promote new products, features, or services by highlighting value points in a concise and entertaining way. However, using an image to promote an upcoming event or program can also be successful.
Post subject matter and topics that create audience engagement, but avoid overwhelming them with too much of one type of content, or worse—boring them by not posting enough. As you dive into the world of digital video advertising, keep a well-rounded approach to your strategy. Too many videos may cause your audience to lose interest. Keep them on their feet by adding in variation, and don’t be afraid to mix it up!
3. Test, test again, and keep testing
The rise of digital video advertising has encouraged many businesses to incorporate videos into their social strategy, but how do you know if it’s right for you?
The answer? Tracking and testing.
A/B testing content on social platforms is an ongoing process in any marketing initiative. Remember to take it slow, before putting a big budget towards video production.
Here are a few A/B testing suggestions to get you started:
Track all of your efforts. A/B testing will provide you with more data and knowledge on what your social media audience likes and dislikes. Knowledge is power! Use your findings to give your audience what they’re looking for, on whichever platform you’re testing. Remember, you can never be too thorough when it comes to testing different types of content. Something that worked for another business, may not work for yours—and that’s OK. Try new things! Yes, some ideas will flop, but others will fly! Make sure you learn from all of your results and apply new knowledge to future initiatives.
4. Utilize platform insights and reporting
Monitor and report the success of each video ad. Notice how your audience reacts, and whether or not the video created conversations or engagement online. Did more people engage with your post than normal? Were engagement rates higher on certain platforms and lower on others? Did you gain any new followers?
Asking these questions will help as you build out your content calendar, and ultimately, create a robust social media marketing strategy. Defining and monitoring a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) will determine what types of content to continue making and posting to your social channels. There are many KPIs to monitor but start with tracking follower growth, link clicks, and engagement metrics.
Digital video advertising is a powerful tool in the world of social media marketing. However, take precautions when adding social video marketing into your holistic digital marketing strategy. Be smart and strategic; get your feet wet with A/B testing and take the time needed to learn the likes/dislikes of your target audience. Last but not least, remember that images are still important to sprinkle into your overall strategy. Have fun with it, and take risks! Now, lights - camera - action!
People with Latinx identities make up one of the fastest-growing audience segments in the United States. As the growth in this segment shifts from immigration-based to U.S.-born-based, advertisers must look at the impact of language to market to Latinx populations in the US.
In this webinar, Sofía Escamilla shares Acento's insights on how to better reach bilingual Latinx people in the U.S. We review the U.S. Latinx bilingual population size, psychographic characteristics, and media insights as it relates to language and their user experience.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time-consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
Visualizing the Future of Marketing and Work With Publicis Vet Rishad Tobaccowala [:05]
Since leaving his post as Publicis Groupe’s chief strategy officer in March, Rishad Tobaccowala has been busy advising companies, promoting his new book, and looking to the future of advertising, technology, and media.
P.S. This interview from AdExchanger is a great complement to Tobaccowala's AdTech Unfiltered podcast interview.
Connected TV Connects with Voters During COVID [:04]
The health emergency of COVID-19 has forced political advertisers to accelerate the adoption of digital channels. Not only is there more of a need to make up for lost opportunities to meet voters in-person, it’s inevitable as people consume more content on digital channels. As more viewers adopt streaming, political advertiser now must enter the CTV realm to reach younger voters.
How To Solve for Scalability of Publisher First-Party Data [:04]
With the clock ticking on the demise of third-party cookies, it’s time for publisher first-party data to take center stage. Buyers will now lean back on publishers and their data to create better, more customized alignment. With that, however, comes a loss of scalability. Setting up and managing custom programs will take time and effort. One solution is to move publisher first-party data upstream from the ad server.
Why Platform Changes are a Bigger Deal than GDPR [:03]
The ad industry is facing major changes. When a platform like Google or Apple comes in with decisions on the fly, millions of people who use those platforms have to comply. A policy change within Google and Apple has potential to completely change the industry. For example, with Apple’s more recent IDFA announcement. The good news is that the outcry of the tight timeline allowed more time for developers to prepare.
It May Seem All Quiet on the CCPA Front, But Don’t Get Complacent: CCPA Enforcement has Begun [:04]
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has been mostly out of the headlines since enforcement started in July – but that doesn’t mean businesses can take their eye off the ball. On July 1, the California AG’s office sent a series of warning notices to businesses for alleged violations of the CCPA. Under the law, businesses have 30 days to cure their violation before the AG takes any action, but it seems unlikely that ad tech companies will be part of this first wave of enforcement.
Report Reveals Independent Voters Most Expensive to Target Via TV, Republicans The Cheapest [:02]
Independent TV voters are the most expensive ones to reach, while Republicans appear to be the most cost-effective voters to target via local TV advertising, according to a MediaPost analysis of data contained in a new report Nielsen and Advertising Analytics. The report is based on public data compiled for political advertising buys made on local broadcast stations in four markets, but the researchers say it is representative of the relative costs of political ad buys on local TV stations.
How Publishers are Getting Around the Branded Content Slump [:07]
2020 was supposed to be the year that publishers cracked branded content and diversified their revenue streams, but that hasn’t happened. As the pandemic cuts into publishers’ revenue streams from every angle, branded content divisions have gone from prize products to problem children. The Drum talks to major publishers to see if this is just a short-term slow down in branded content, or if this is the end.
Pandemic Spurs Journalists to Go It Alone via Email [:04]
A slew of high-profile journalists have recently announced they are leaving newsrooms to launch their own, independent brands, mostly via email newsletters. Leveraging a loyal audience with a desire for in-depth reporting, journalists who focus on business, technology or politics are offering newsletter subscriptions ranging from $60-$100 annually and free of ads. See also Digiday’s recent take on this trend.
Computer-Generated Realities are Becoming Ubiquitous [:10]
From concerts to graduation ceremonies to wedding nuptials to happy hours, we are spending more time congregating in virtual environments that were unthinkable just a few years ago. This article from The Economist explores how the rapid adoption and technical framework may open the door for a very real future of virtual and augmented mixed realities.
Driving quality customer engagement is now more important for marketers than ever before. Effective engagement helps to better nurture leads through the funnel and consequently drive increased conversions, retention, customer lifetime value, and more. A massive 54% of consumers, however, say that companies need to fundamentally transform how they engage. There’s much lacking in modern consumer engagement tactics, and creating a single source of truth is an important key to changing this.
A single source of truth (SSOT) was a term first coined for use in information systems design, yet it’s just as relevant to a number of different fields today, including marketing. By definition, a SSOT means keeping your data in a single location and managing it from there. Employing one centralized location for data management makes it easier to analyze channel performance, create accurate reports, and make informed decisions.
Large brands that have branches and teams located in different places benefit considerably from having a SSOT, which allows them to access and use the same data profile regardless of where they are. Now that marketing is becoming increasingly multifaceted and complex, maintaining a SSOT is essential for businesses of every size, particularly when it comes to tracking engagement.
Key changes in the marketing and business landscape in recent years are the driving force that make a SSOT so important today. Here’s why:
The number of valuable marketing channels continues to grow, and so, therefore, does the amount of business data that comes with them. Consider online channels like social media platforms, websites, online ads, email, as well as offline channels like in-store interactions, call centers, text messages, TV and print advertising, etc. Businesses need to track such metrics as impressions, engagement, and conversions across each channel to stay on top of their marketing strategy.
The more channels there are, the more tools you need to manage them. Each tool has its own analytical features to help brands track their performance. That makes it very challenging to get a full picture of your marketing efforts as a whole. How can you determine how different audience touchpoints across channels work together to drive a sale?
Today, marketing data is so numerous and disparate that marketing teams simply can’t manage it manually. Few have the expertise to aggregate all data, assess its quality, and analyze it effectively. Even enlisting a full-time data manager isn’t enough to keep up with the ongoing stream of highly relevant engagement data available.
Establishing a single source of truth is a challenge for modern marketers. Once implemented, though, a SSOT offers so many benefits that it becomes difficult to envision how you once worked without it.
When managing your marketing engagement data using a number of different platforms, it is difficult to ensure each source delivers accurate and updated data. Each platform may track different data sources. Some may update in real-time while others pull data that is hours or days old.
When you aggregate and validate data in a single source, you can ensure uniformity with regards to how and when your reports are updated, improving data quality and analysis in the process. This, in turn, helps marketers increase their confidence in data analysis conclusions.
Introducing a single source of truth into your marketing set-up makes it possible to fill gaps in your understanding of the customer journey. Analyzing social media engagement, email engagement, website engagement, and offline interactions in isolation tells you very little about how these channels work together to influence purchasing decisions. With unified data, you get the full context pertaining to how different audience touchpoints influence consumers’ decision-making.
Marketing and sales teams can then take advantage of these new insights to create content that is more relevant and timely for their audience. They can also use cross-channel marketing with confidence. In a recent report conducted by Omnisend, it was found that purchase and engagement rates are 250% higher for marketers that use three or more channels. If you’re not investing in cross-channel marketing, you’re undoubtedly falling behind.
Each social media platform and monitoring tool has different ways to measure audience interactions. This creates challenges in effectively conducting any form of comparative analysis. And, to make it even more complex, these independent platforms also use the same terms to categorize data that is inherently unalike. A great example of this issue is social media impressions. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all define impressions their own way. Facebook impressions count the number of times an ad appears on a screen. Twitter counts an impression whenever a user sees a tweet. Third-party analytics tools can categorize them in other ways also.
Using a single provider to report these metrics makes it much easier to understand the difference between data types and see their relative impact accordingly. Considering how engagement performance metrics vary across social platforms as well as how they’re defined in the first place offers much more accurate and valuable insights.
There is a plethora of performance data relevant to various teams within an organization. Creating a single source of truth for all relevant data helps teams to derive new insights that they wouldn’t have otherwise. For example, factors related to PR efforts or customer service could impact marketing engagement. Once all teams understand how their efforts are interconnected, this encourages more cross-team collaboration. Empowering everyone with access to the same information helps them understand what impacts various business divisions and how to optimize collaboration efforts.
Exposing insights into the customer journey not only helps marketers deliver a relevant marketing message, but it also helps you serve your customers better. When sales, marketing, and customer service teams all have access to the same engagement data, it’s easier to identify what factors drive upsells, cross-sells, and churn. You can then adapt your overall strategy to fix any standing issues and optimize efforts that turn people into repeat customers. Having a complete picture of audience engagement data also makes it easier to segment and offer them a personalized customer experience, catered to their unique interests and needs.
This optimization can drive more revenue as well. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for products when there’s better customer experience:
Creating a SSOT for engagement data makes it possible to analyze and learn exactly what kind of marketing message helps turn leads into paying customers. Having all your engagement data in one place helps you fill in gaps in the customer journey, especially with cross-channel interactions. For example, using the right marketing intelligence platform, it’s possible to see how leads discovered through Google search converted into paying customers through a Facebook ad.
Using insights like these to optimize your cross-channel marketing investment, deliver a more relevant message, and improve customer service overall can help drive your bottom line significantly. Creating a single source of truth will require a financial investment in terms of software technology, but it’s always worth the ROI it brings.
Once you understand what establishing a SSOT really means for your business, you need to set up an effective system to make it happen. With the amount of relevant business data out there, this is no simple task when done manually. You have to collect data from each marketing channel, unify it into a single system, store it, and analyze it. You also need to be able to update your data feeds quickly to keep up with the latest insights.
All these things considered, investing in marketing analytics software is the best way to move forward. Rather than just adding another tool to your arsenal, the right software can serve to replace tools you already use for storing and analyzing data from different marketing channels.
There are many options out there for marketing analytics software. Here are some factors to consider to help you choose the right option for your needs:
Most importantly, you need a tool that can collect data from all relevant sources. There are many tools that can pull together all your social media and advertising engagement data. However, you likely have other data that is relevant to your business, such as call center interactions, offline revenue data, or historical performance data.
How often does your analytics tool pull data? Weekly, daily, hourly, etc? Having up-to-date engagement data is incredibly valuable, especially if you’re investing in PPC advertising.
Make sure your software has all the features you need to analyze your engagement data the way you want to. Some solutions can create customized metrics based on what’s most important to your business. Make sure your solution also provides access to historical performance so you can use these insights to optimize future campaigns.
Best-in-class marketing analytics tools provide AI-driven automation features to help you get the most out of your data insights. Automating analytics reports is one example of this. Before investing in a tool, make sure it has the automation capabilities you need to maximize the value of having a single source of truth.
Most marketing analytics software solutions are self-service tools. However, some businesses may want and need guidance from professionals about how to maximize the value of their data insights. In that case, consider investing in a software solution that offers additional agency services to help you with your strategy.
The vast majority of marketers today work with disparate tools to analyze campaign performance. In the future, creating a single source of truth will become the standard for any organization that wants to invest in cross-channel marketing. The technology needed to create a centralized location for their data is already readily available and marketers that prioritize implementing it now will set themselves up to benefit the most in the long-term.