Undertaking a marketing technology (MarTech) audit can offer several significant advantages for a large company. Key benefits include:   Enhanced Efficiency and Cost Savings Identification of Redundancies: A MarTech audit can reveal overlapping tools and platforms. By eliminating redundancies, companies can reduce costs associated with licensing and maintenance. Optimization of Usage: Audits help identify underutilized tools. Companies can either eliminate these tools or optimize their use, ensuring they get the best return on investment (ROI). Streamlined Processes: With a clear understanding of the current MarTech stack, companies can streamline processes, reducing complexity and improving overall efficiency. Improved Integration and Data Management Better Integration: Audits help assess how well different tools and platforms integrate with each other. Improved integration leads to better data flow, reduced data silos, and more cohesive marketing operations. Data Quality and Management: A thorough audit highlights issues with data collection, storage, and usage. This allows the company to address data quality issues, ensuring that marketing decisions are based on accurate, up-to-date information. Increased ROI from Marketing Efforts Alignment with Business Goals: By understanding the effectiveness of the current MarTech stack, companies can better align their tools with strategic business goals, leading to more targeted and effective marketing efforts. Improved Campaign Performance: With a clear understanding of the tools available and how they are being used, companies can refine their campaigns, leading to better performance metrics such as higher conversion rates and improved customer engagement. Enhanced Decision-Making and Strategic Planning Informed Decision-Making: A MarTech audit provides detailed insights into the performance and capabilities of existing tools. This information is critical for making informed decisions about future investments in technology. Strategic Planning: The audit helps identify gaps in the current technology stack, enabling the company to plan strategically for future MarTech investments that align with long-term goals. Compliance and Risk Management Regulatory Compliance: A MarTech audit can identify potential compliance issues related to data privacy and security, helping the company avoid legal and financial penalties. Risk Mitigation: By identifying outdated or unsupported technologies, companies can mitigate risks related to security breaches or system failures. Enhanced Customer Experience Personalization: By optimizing the MarTech stack, companies can deliver more personalized and relevant customer experiences. This can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. Omnichannel Consistency: An audit helps ensure that the marketing tools in use support consistent messaging and customer experiences across all channels. Competitive Advantage Staying Ahead of Trends: Regular audits keep the company informed about new technologies and trends in the MarTech landscape, allowing them to adopt innovations before competitors. Differentiation: A well-optimized MarTech stack can give the company a competitive edge by enabling more effective and innovative marketing strategies. In summary, a marketing technology audit enables large companies to optimize their MarTech stack, reduce costs, improve efficiency, enhance decision-making, and ultimately, drive better marketing outcomes that are closely aligned with their business goals.

Marketing Operations and Operational Process blog series Series introduction: Marketing Operations is a complex mixture of people, processes, and technology all working together to prove - and improve - the value of marketing to your company, your customer, and your employees. While the technology and people components of this “Marketing Operations Triangle” get a lot of attention, Operational Process deserves much more focus as a driver of value. In this blog series, we’ll be giving it the attention it so richly deserves. The UK telecommunications company O2 is a great example of how improved operational processes can not only drive efficiency but also enable a marketing team to free up time for higher-value marketing tasks. O2 went from having non-standardized approaches to campaign management that were creating many problems (more on those later) to a streamlined process that resulted in: a 27% increase YoY in the number of campaigns executed, and 100% accuracy in campaign execution. Campaign management challenges O2 had a small team managing all sorts of operational requests – campaign execution, peer reviewing of campaigns, building out assets and campaign flows in Eloqua, changing lead management processes, and much more. The team did anything and everything related to campaign execution, data, marketing operations, and automation. They’d receive requests from two different business units, typically via email or a quick phone call saying, “can you just do this for us now?” The problem was that these requests didn’t have a structured process behind them to ensure: (1) a clear direction and time frame for executing the brief and (2) all the information and resources needed to execute the request were included with the brief. “The briefs they received were so dramatically different. Some requests came with lots of details and relevant resources/assets,” says Rebecca Clark, Customer Success Manager at Sojourn Solutions, who worked with the O2 team on improving the process, “while others did not. The timeframes for delivery could be all over the place too.”  The O2 team simply didn't have the resources to manage it all, and they lacked enough budget to outsource the work. In fact, the team’s budget was being reduced. O2’s campaign management, especially in light of how requests and briefs were being handled, just wasn't working as efficiently as it could have. Setting expectations with the business units making requests was a massive and time-consuming challenge, and so was managing the team’s budgets, priorities, and schedules. The team would sometimes run out of budget for the month in the middle of the month and then had to seek authorization to spend more. Their operational processes clearly needed to change around campaign management. The change: Streamlining campaign management Due to the sheer volume of the O2 team’s work, much of it unplanned for requests, the team just weren’t able to prioritize work and schedule campaigns  effectively. They finally decided they needed a new process and a more supportive infrastructure around campaign management.   Fortunately, O2’s Campaign Program Manager, Nicky Clarke, had a solid background in project management so she understood the need for and challenges around driving improvement of operational processes. O2's Clarke sought to implement a streamlined process that not only allowed the team to see how their budget was being spent, but also ensured that the briefs and requests coming in had a specific process and quality standard supporting them.  “We introduced the O2 team to Smartsheet, which is a project planning tool,” says Sojourn’s Clark. “You can have forms and attachments within a Smartsheet, and the form is submitted by the person requesting the work.” The requester has to fill in certain fields and then complete a detailed brief that's attached. So it’s an automated process where updates get made, and where each request gets allocated to the right resource with a realistic time frame for executing the work. “That approach with Smartsheet gave the O2 team a more structured approach to requests and briefs,” says Clark.  Adoption of the solution took some time, as the people making the requests were used to just picking up the phone or sending quick “request” emails. They were told to make requests using the new process. “The O2 team became really good at telling business units that they needed to follow the new operational process in order to make a request,” reports Clark, “and it made the team’s workflow so much easier.” Results: Campaign efficiency & enhanced capabilities  With the new process in place, and despite a decreasing budget, the O2 team was able to increase the number of campaigns it executed by 27% YoY. The effectiveness of those campaigns increased too, some of that due to better briefs that helped inform more effective asset/content creation. There was also a huge time saving by having everything in one place and not having to chase down missing pieces of a brief. The team could actually plan their days and their weeks, because the requests were coming from one place with one standard process. “The new, streamlined campaign management process freed up the O2 team’s time to actually consider how they could manage their workload even better,” says Sojourn’s Clark. “They started asking, ‘are the processes behind the things we do as good as they could be?’” The streamlined process freed up some of their budget too, so they could analyze their tech and consider bringing in more effective tools. O2’s Nicky Clarke summarized O2’s operational process improvement journey this way: “We saw a huge increase in the volume of work coming into our team and our budget decreased by 50% at the same time, so this meant we had to optimize the way we worked in order to prioritize what we were doing and deliver more with less. We re-organized our team internally and upskilled their capabilities. We worked with Sojourn to introduce Smartsheet for brief logging and workflow management within our team and cross-functionally with our external agencies. It’s made a big difference. Now we’re constantly reviewing processes and optimizing ways of working in weekly collaboration sessions.”  If you’re interested in learning more about how to increase the efficiency - and effectiveness of your campaign production or other marketing operations related processes,  contact us  today. Next post in series:   How holistic Project Management optimizes Operational Processes in Marketing Operations (post 5 of 5)

A strategic focus across S&P Global is LEAN efficiency and process, and efforts like this contribute significantly to our strategic business goals, as well as helping to ensure Marketing is operationally streamlined. Zoe (Lowther) Mol, VP Global Marketing, S&P Global Platts Introduction Data in its raw, unfiltered form offers no insights to drive great business decision-making (it’s simply “more information” in a TMI world). It takes skilled, experienced professionals to make meaning and provide strategic, actionable insights from data. Enter S&P Global Platts, in business for over a century and now the leading independent provider of information, benchmark prices and analytics for the energy and commodities markets. The London-based business intelligence company has over 1,000 employees spread out over 19 offices worldwide, all of them with one goal — to leverage data to bring clarity and transparency to the energy and commodities markets. Challenge: Work differently Keeping up with the fast pace of global change has now become a core organizational capacity. Call it agility or adaptability or whatever you want (this isn’t buzzword bingo), but change happens fast today and individuals and organizations had better be ready to accommodate it. Well, S&P Global, the 17,000-people strong, global parent company of S&P Global Platts, decided that the entire global operation would migrate its marketing automation to the Marketo platform. Solution: A 3-part migration To complete the planned migration from Eloqua to Marketo, S&P Global Platts worked with its partner, Sojourn Solutions. A three-part solution was co-developed that was structured around risk mitigation, campaign migration, and multiple integrations. We'll look at how each part of S&P Global Platts’ Marketo migration solution was developed and executed... Results: Savings, plaudits, awards S&P Global Platts finished its migration on schedule and without downtime or disruption of its MAP operations, as they’d promised their parent company. Perhaps best of all, S&P Global Platts saw huge benefits to their bottom line, including a 75% savings on campaign migration costs to Marketo. This was a true collaborative effort between Platts’ Marketing, IT, and Content teams, and executed by our preferred partner, Sojourn Solutions.  Melissa Thames, Global Head Marketing Operations, S&P Global Platts In the end, the S&P Global Platts migration project was recognized with a prestigious 2018 Revvies Award, in the category “The Transformer.” S&P Global Platts saw huge benefits to their bottom line, including a 75% savings on campaign migration costs to Marketo. In addition, as the Revvie Award press release explains, “after implementing the Marketo platform, S&P Global Platts automated their subscription and information distribution process, saving more than 15 weeks of people-hours annually” and gaining massive cost benefits. (include in section where award image appears to left of text) Since 2008, Sojourn has been our go-to marketing operations strategy and support team. They most recently helped us successfully move to Marketo from Eloqua which involved many integrations and complex use cases that required solutioning. We couldn’t have done it without them. Melissa Thames, Head of Global Marketing Operations

How does an enterprise organization go about scaling adoption of its new Eloqua-driven automated email renewal solution with its sales team? In this post, we explore how Naylor’s leadership team did just that, how it addressed strong initial objections from the sales teams, and how sales reps who had once been early objectors to automation eventually became passionate advocates for the technology. In a second post, we’ll take a deeper dive into Naylor’s solution itself. Naylor Association Solutions , with corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia, works with trade associations across the nation, including the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), the United Motorcoach Association (UMA), and many more, helping them maximize membership engagement and generate more revenues. Naylor’s services and business units include member communication (creating various publications for associations), event management, and association management. Naylor helps its association members develop various publications, including magazines, newsletters, and member directories. Naylor’s sales team also sells advertising space in these same publications to companies interested in engaging the association’s membership. So, hypothetically speaking, a medical device manufacturer might want to buy advertising space in a newsletter or directory from the American Medical Association. Naylor would develop the publication, working with the association, and then sell ad space to generate revenues. Naylor’s automated solution runs into initial skepticism Utter the word “automation” in almost any workplace today, and the people impacted start to get nervous about their jobs. Fears of robots stealing our jobs aren’t just fodder for science fiction, but represent a visceral concern for workers all across the global economy – especially as technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to improve.  As Naylor rolled out its automated renewal email solution to its existing advertisers, using that automation to quickly generate renewals and cash flow without the involvement of any sales reps, getting the sales team on board became an obvious challenge. Naylor’s Kent Agramonte , then Marketing and Research Manager, was tasked with getting sales rep buy-in for the change initiative. “There was early pushback from the reps,” explained Agramonte, “they felt threatened that automation was taking away parts of their jobs and commissions. They also feared we were ‘dehumanizing’ our customer service approach.” Agramonte carefully explained that “seeking renewals were taking a lot of time away from sales reps, and if they spent less time seeking renewals from existing clients (advertisers), they could spend more time upselling and seeking new clients, thus gaining higher commissions.” Many reps, understandably, took a wait-and-see stance. 3 keys to scaling adoption  Sales Reps soon recognized their liberation from routine, manual tasks.  Agramonte’s message was clear and consistent. The automated, scalable email renewal solution would give Naylor’s sales reps the gift of more time to perform higher-value tasks, like upselling existing clients and finding new clients, tasks that would actually help reps generate more leads and higher commissions. In addition, sales reps received training on how the automated application worked so they could effectively perform their follow-up roles, such as when customers opened an email but didn’t respond. Reps began performing more higher-value tasks.  Rolling the solution out slowly. The culture of any sales team can be a fragile thing. Naylor anticipated some objections from sales reps, and Agramonte rolled out the automated solution gradually, gaining buy-in from sales reps project-by-project, almost rep-by-rep. As the team observed success in these projects, they became more open to the blended “human + machine” solution.  Answering the “dehumanization” objection.  Sales reps were justifiably proud of the high level of service they were providing to customers, but they soon realized two things: (1) customers quickly grew accustomed to the automated approach, much like shopping online at Amazon, and (2) sales reps continued to be involved in higher-level follow up and upselling activities that drove superior customer experiences and higher sales commissions. “We explained to our reps that the automation would help them service clients more effectively,” said Agramonte, “while making it easier for them to go after new customers. We found that many customers actually preferred communication through the automated, DIY email approach managed by Eloqua.” Sales Reps move from objectors to advocates On average, it was taking our reps three calls to renew a client and after launching our automated renewals program we renewed 583 clients without a phone call. This saved our reps 1,749 phone calls since launching the program.  The sales reps recognized that the automated email renewal campaigns were achieving the results promised, and then some. As promised, the reps were indeed spending more time upselling and pursuing new customer leads, as well as generating more commission. “Sales reps who were initially against the automated solutions are now all for it,” said Agramonte. One of our projects reached a renewal rate of 78.6% – this was a 17% increase from last year. We also oversold our new sales target on this project by 7%. In one of the early projects, a sales rep saw that the renewals gained through the automated approach were massive, and he strongly questioned the system’s ability to accurately track results. “I carefully explained to him how the tracking worked,” said Agramonte, “and once the sales rep realized how accurate our tracking was, he quickly became an advocate for the automated email renewal.” One of our initially hesitant adopter’s has seen a 16% increase in new sales YTD over this same period last year. She attributes this increase to the time saved not having to call her renewal advertisers. In a telling adoption story, Agramonte explains that they’d planned to exclude the automated renewal email approach from a particular project. The sales rep associated with the project, who had earlier opposed the automation, “quite vocally demanded that we use the automation for it,” Agramonte chuckled. Nothing scales success like success What’s clear is that Naylor did a great job not only working collaboratively with IT, marketing, sales, and other departments to develop the automated solution, but they also did a brilliant job scaling adoption with their initially-skeptical sales reps. In the end, the solution worked: sales reps who started out as passionate skeptics of the automated approach ultimately became its strongest advocates and ambassadors. Stay tuned for our follow-up post where we look at what Naylor decided to do in terms of changing the way it emailed and interacted with its ad customers, leveraging the marketing automation power of Eloqua to work smarter in getting renewals and upselling via email. The solution was a blended approach where technology was enabled and deployed to do what it does best while sales reps were enabled and deployed to do higher-level activities they do best. Sound interesting? Reach out  to us today to learn how we can help you achieve similar results leveraging marketing automation.

We partnered with Sojourn Solutions to help us address the challenge of driving technological transformation to enable us to work smarter, including outlining processes for developing marketing campaigns, lead generation, and lead scoring across the organization. Our latest joint initiative, the automated email renewal solution, was a massive success – to the point that my CFO asked us to roll it out across our organization. Chad Lloyd, Director of Sales and Marketing Operations, Naylor Association Solutions   Naylor Association Solutions, with corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia, works with trade and professional associations across the nation, including the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), the United Motorcoach Association (UMA), and many more, helping them maximize membership engagement and generate more revenues. Naylor’s services and business units include member communication (creating various publications for associations), event management, and association management. Challenge Naylor’s challenge was on the technology side, because its previous outreach efforts to get renewals from existing advertisers, as well as its approach to advertising prospects, involved a high level of manual operations performed by Naylor’s sales reps. “It was basically an outbound telephone sales operation,” explains Lloyd, “and most of our existing customers were simply agreeing to renew on the phone without any upsell. We were paying sales commissions, but getting little ROI” from the sales-reps-on-the-phone approach.  Solution Lloyd and his team, working with Sojourn Solutions and Eloqua, developed an email automation system that helped them run their renewal campaigns. The application took customer data from Naylor’s MIS (management information system) and CRM and put it into the field merges within Naylor’s automated renewal emails in Eloqua. The integrations allowed for the sharing and accuracy of relevant customer data, making the automated emails personalized to the particular advertising customer. Results Renewals came in faster via the automated renewal campaigns, generating more revenue without any involvement from the sales reps. Prior to launching the renewal campaign, 95% of Naylor’s renewals were processed in an average of 87 days. After the launch, Naylor was capturing 95% of its renewal revenue in an average of 24 days (63 days faster). “We shortened the amount of time to get renewals, and therefore recognized those revenues much faster, which made our finance people very happy” explains Lloyd. A success story now being spread across Naylor. Naylor’s CFO recognized the efficiency and increased revenues that Lloyd was driving with the automated email renewal campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the CFO then asked Lloyd to help roll-out the successful automated email solution across the Naylor organization. “We’re bringing this new capability to other parts of the business, and also expanding it to our highest-spend advertisers and new advertisers,” he says.

Mike Comey  is the Head of Loyalty Insights, Loyalty Solutions at FIS , a Fortune 500 fintech company with about 55,000 employees operating in 200 locations throughout the world. FIS serves customers in 3 main areas: (1) merchant solutions, helping merchants process payments from customers; (2) banking solutions, helping banks with core processing, ATM networks, loyalty programs, and more; (3) capital markets, which means investing and financial transactions. Comey and his team at FIS (about 5 marketers) work to help banks promote and implement loyalty programs (giving bank customers points, merchandise, and/or cash back for using bank-issued credit/debit cards). Mike shared his Eloqua success story at a Sojourn virtual Eloqua User Group meeting, and this post spotlights his share.  On the marketing challenges FIS faced The FIS flagship loyalty product is the program of choice for over 3,000 financial institutions. If the scale wasn’t big enough, these loyalty programs also present massive operational complexities. As Comey explains it, “we do all the back-end from the scoring of the transactions, awarding the points, allowing for all the redemption channels and enabling our institutional clients to customize the programs as they see fit.” All the different program components add a great deal of complexity to what Comey’s team has to do in terms of dynamic content, program communication, and how they display program offerings. And since the end users of the programs are the clients of banks, FIS constantly confronts the need for accuracy and precision with information. “We’ve got a strong obligation to ensure we don’t make mistakes, and that we don’t display information that a cardholder shouldn’t see, “ says Comey, “our job is therefore quite complex and time-consuming as far as marketing challenges go.” Finally, Comey’s team is tasked with promoting the different redemption channels, communicating to cardholders what rewards (i.e., merchandise,  travel, etc.) are available to them. All of it represents a massively complicated challenge. How the FIS team deployed Eloqua and won an award Before deploying Eloqua in 2016, Comey’s team was using a rudimentary email platform. “We’d send about four emails per month and had virtually no customer segmentation. It was just very clunky, hard to use, and very slow,” explains Comey. “So when we launched Eloqua, it was life-changing. We were able to better manage all the complexities in our programs, but also open up new possibilities for how we reach out to cardholders, with different types of messaging and ways we track and analyze data.” The early gains FIS saw using Eloqua were so strong that the company won a Markie award in 2017 for rapid transformation. As Comey says, “We had lots of energy and we just built, built, built,” which led to its own set of problems.”  Confronting “the monster”  Unfortunately, FIS was creating a monster as it grew its utilization of Eloqua. “We were using these three main pieces — canvases, segments, and emails — to try to account for all the complexity we have,” says Comey. “We would create different canvases based on email content and based on bank clients that have different program offerings. Sometimes we’d create a different canvas for different product types or we’d do a lot of triggered emails. So if a cardholder has a certain transaction, then that would trigger a certain type of email.” FIS also developed customer segments using Eloqua. “We would try to do some sophisticated marketing segmenting around customer attributes and propensities,” says Comey.  Every time FIS faced an obstacle or hurdle, it would simply “build, build, build”  something new to overcome that challenge in the short-term. But it was done ad hoc, not in any systematic and standardized way. “Unfortunately, we weren’t operating with any efficiencies and we weren’t thinking holistically,” says Comey. “We would just take every problem and create a new canvas, a segment for it. And over time we’d created a monster.” What really changed the focus for Comey was when he started losing marketers from his team due to burn out and exhaustion, largely caused by managing the monster.  “The amount of time we were spending on Eloqua was just overwhelming,” says Comey. “We’ve got such a complex product so the learning curve for team members is a big challenge here. Being able to learn Eloqua is another challenge. When our people started leaving, we just knew we needed to change something.” Taming the monster: FIS works with Sojourn to develop solutions Comey reached out to Sojourn with one question: “how can we unravel this monster so that we’re not doing all this repetitive work that’s exhausting our people?” Sojourn analyzed the issue and developed a solution that helped FIS get away from all the one-off, ad hoc work it had been creating — and instead begin working more systematically, in standardized ways that would scale.  For example, Sojourn analyzed all the canvases and segments FIS had created and then worked to reduce them in number (by standardizing them). As a result, FIS was able to move from having 120 promotional canvases down to just a single monthly canvas.   “That single change saved us over 600 hours per year, just on the canvas side,” says Comey. When it came to segments, it was a similar story. FIS had 107 different segments in 2019, but Sojourn helped FIS bring that down to just 16, saving FIS even more time and work. Regarding emails, Sojourn helped FIS “trim the time it took for us to create each email from six and a half hours down to less than two,” says Comey. In total, Sojourn helped Comey’s small team save some 3,000 hours, reducing its workload dramatically. “Every hour that we spend doing operational work is an hour that’s not spent analyzing data, finding new ideas, and coming up with creative new campaigns,” says Comey. “I cannot emphasize enough how much Sojourn has helped make our operations more efficient,  so that we’re actually maximizing what we’re getting out of Eloqua.” FIS has allocated a lot of resources into its use of Eloqua — between the platform itself, the team hours, the vendors — “and we’ve got to ensure that we’re maximizing every dollar we spend,” says Comey. “Sojourn is helping us do exactly that.” Today, Comey’s team has more time for analyzing and leveraging data, as well as doing creative and high-level/strategic work. “We’ve also gained more time to think about how we can leverage Eloqua even more,” Comey says. “Being able to save a combined 3000 hours has been transformational for my team here at FIS.”   Check out our Campaign Execution Services  to help improve your marketing automation campaign efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance. Or,  contact us  to discover how your organization can get the most out of your Oracle Eloqua platform.

Multi-touch attribution  enables marketers to connect (attribute) touchpoints and marketing activities to revenues. Having this MTA capability not only informs better marketing tactics and decision-making, but also enables marketers to “prove” their value more effectively in the C-suite.  Progress Software , the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications, has moved from a single-touch attribution model to MTA. As Carmen Gardiner , Progress’s Director of Marketing Operations, explains it: “A single touch model just doesn’t give you the visibility you need to make marketing decisions, especially in the enterprise buying cycle. MTA measures a wider range of buying touchpoints, not just around a single individual but also includes buying groups. MTA shines a light on the success of the tactics and channels that you’re investing in, giving you more insight into how those tactics, those campaigns, and that spend is really affecting the buyer’s journey.” The catalyst for change at Progress Progress’s MTA journey began with a change in C-level leadership a few years back. The new team “was used to getting multi-touch attribution,” notes Gardiner. “And we simply didn’t have it.” So driving MTA became a mandate for Gardiner and her marketing ops team.  What did leadership expect? They wanted Progress “to have the data to know what’s working and what’s not, and be able to show the reasoning behind asking for [marketing] spend,” explains Gardiner. “MTA would help explain why we might need money for top of funnel programs. You’d have data to show that it’s an integral part of the buyer journey and not just focusing on that last touch point.” Big challenges Whether it’s driving MTA or any other initiative,  change management  is all about dynamically integrating technology, processes, and people around the new way of working. “Technology was the hardest part for us,” explains Gardiner, “because MTA was a new concept at Progress,” which had been using single touch attribution. “We had challenges getting the scripts to play well with our CMS [content management system]. We even lost a vendor over that. We had to jump over that particular hurdle because you can’t get touchpoints without scripts on your website.” Getting the processes right was another challenge. “It’s so hard to change your thinking when you’ve been thinking for 20 years in terms of campaigns: we had to change to touchpoints. We just weren’t used to tying those touchpoints to spend and connecting that with our budgeting,” says Gardiner. Progress tackled technology and processes before the “people” part, which sounds eminently sensible. “If you don’t have your technology and your processes down, your people aren’t going to understand it, use it, and buy into it,” says Gardiner. Progress started its MTA journey with a small group. “We have three marketing groups,” says Gardiner, “and so we started the one that needed the visibility the most.” As Gardiner notes in our second post, Progress may have (in retrospect) been better served by bringing its people in even earlier, as Progress worked to get those challenging technology and process parts of the solution off the ground.  Bizible for MTA Bizible  was not Progress’s first choice for MTA but was its final choice. “It’s working really well for us. It’s given us greater visibility into the contribution of the top and bottom of funnel programs, the first touch, the pipeline acceleration. It’s opened marketing’s mind into the possibility of being able to report on things that aren’t last touch and allowing them to better understand which mix may lead to better conversion.” Bizible enables Progress to see where the gaps are: “When you do funnel conversion stats, we can see where we need to get people/leads in at the top or need something in the middle of the funnel,” says Gardiner. “It’s not ‘one-and-done’ tactics, but a mix that eases people through their buyer’s journey.” Progress can see that full-funnel journey, and where its funnel might be “leaky,” in order to plug those leaks. Impact of MTA  MTA has moved Progress, especially its enterprise team, away from campaigns and towards touchpoints. “Instead of doing events, because campaign reporting told them events were great, they now look at the touchpoint attribution models. They can see which channels and tactics are better at different parts of the funnel. So they get a better, multidimensional picture of the buyer’s journey and see how their combined efforts contribute to pipeline and revenue.” The way marketing decisions get made is now more data-driven, focusing on getting the mix of marketing tactics/activities right: “decisions are based on a multidimensional understanding of how tactics and actions are impacting every piece of the funnel. Marketers feel better, for instance, going to C-level executives and asking for more AdWords spend because they can actually show the impact of that spend,” says Gardiner. Marketers at Progress are also conducting more experiments because they’re able to pull the levers and tweak tactics/actions at different stages of the funnel, then measure and iterate upon results. They can “fail small” and learn during a data-driven process of continuous improvement. Examples of real MTA impact Gardiner points to Google AdWords as a good example of how Progress has used MTA to have a more experimental approach that leads to smarter marketing decisions and more ROI. “We were spending a lot of money on Google AdWords in places where we shouldn’t,” notes Gardiner, “but the MTA reporting allowed us to see where our sweet spots were, which investments were actually affecting top of funnel and converting into leads. And so we started spending our money in certain areas [that were working] and stopped spending our money in other areas [that weren’t working]. For some areas that were kind of in the middle, we figured out how we could improve results. We tweaked our ads and experimented. We didn’t just cut our AdWords budget: we increased its performance by about 30%.” Content, which is often deployed around the top of the funnel, is another area impacted by MTA. “Our content teams and product managers love that we can now show the impact that blogs, press releases, and content have on the buyer’s journey. Before MTA, they had no way of showing their impact on the business. So two whole departments now have a seat at the table, asking what kind of content resonates with people? And at what stages in the funnel? They can use MTA to better determine the topics to write about and what content people want.” All of that drives full-funnel ROI. In our next post , we’ll explain what lessons Progress has learned during its MTA journey, lessons that other organizations like yours might apply for themselves. Continue reading here . Interested in learning more about how your organization can begin a journey towards multi-touch attribution? Contact us  today.

As you may have read in our first  of two blog posts about Progress’s journey from single-touch to multi-touch attribution , the result of the change was a large improvement in the efficiency of its marketing function, which also boosted the credibility of marketing within the C-suite. In this second post, we’ll share the 10 key lessons Progress learned during its (still ongoing) MTA journey, as told to us by Carmen Gardiner , Progress’s Director of Marketing Operations. Here they are: C-level sponsorship is a must.  “An MTA journey isn’t a small initiative for a single department to do in a month. It’s got to have C-level sponsorship throughout, and it’s got to be prioritized,” explains Gardiner. “You’ll need to have resources tied to it, with stakeholders committed across the company, from marketing to sales, IT to web to finance and beyond.” Seek early buy-in across the organization.  “Every time you think you’ve got every stakeholder in the room, you’ll discover that you don’t. Seek to get everybody on board as soon as possible, because people have to feel a part of the process for it to work,” says Gardiner. “If I could go back, I would’ve brought people on board sooner rather than later. We felt that it was a good idea to have the technology and processes down before we bought people in, but [in retrospect] I would have brought them in sooner. It took some people a long time to wrap their heads around touchpoint attribution and not campaign attribution.” Select your vendor very, very carefully.  Progress went with Bizible as their MTA vendor, but only after some pitfalls with another vendor. “Keep in mind, from the start,  what you want to have at the end of the journey because, depending on the vendor, MTA can be defined differently,” says Gardiner, “There are a lot of MTA vendors that fall into different categories, that will give you different information, different results. So think carefully about what you want at the end of the journey and then find a vendor that’s going to deliver that.” Measure and celebrate key milestones along the way.  “The MTA journey is a long road and people are going to get tired,” says Gardiner. It’s important to stop and celebrate small wins. Measuring progress is also essential. “One of our product clients wanted to see multi-touch attribution and to know about Google AdWords. We showed them multi-touch attribution and then we tied spend to each keyword, each UTM campaign. So not only could they say they spent 10 grand on AdWords and this was what they got back, but they could dig into every little AdWords campaign, and then figure out what was working and what wasn’t. They were able to refine based off that level of reporting.” Self-service works.  Ideally, you shouldn’t need to be a professional data scientist with an advanced degree to use the tools. “We made it so anybody could go to the BI [business intelligence] dashboard and take a look at it from the different facets,” says Gardiner. “They could look at it from first touch, W-shaped, full path, and get the answers they needed based on the questions they wanted answers to. Self service is really, really important. If people are just allowed to go in there and play, they’re going to be curious, ask questions, and learn.” Expect resistance, work to mitigate it.  “There was some resistance to the change,” says Gardiner. “I was told by one marketer, ‘I don’t understand this, I’m not going to use it.’ We should have brought marketing in much earlier because it’s like walking into cold water.” Yes, people might resist at the beginning, so you should expect that, but be patient and keep communicating the why and the how of the MTA change initiative. Blend the new with the old.  Progress didn’t just eliminate the old way of working and introduce the new one overnight, which would have created massive confusion and frustration among end users. INstead, it rolled out the new while staying with the old. “We would run a team’s marketing metrics meetings for six months and show their campaign data that they usually have. And then marketing ops would give them the Bizible/MTA data and we would interpret that for them,” explains Gardiner. “So they could compare and contrast the datasets, because neither of them is wrong. And after a while, our users got used to the idea that neither was wrong. Neither one is going to give you the golden bullet,” but you can gain insights from both. That “blend of old and new” approach helped prevent confusion and drive adoption. You need a mixture of touchpoints.  “Multi-touch attribution,” says Gardiner, “is just going to help you answer specific, measurable questions like, is my Google AdWords spend helping me affect the top of the funnel? It won’t answer bigger questions like ‘how did my campaign go?’ MTA helps you decide what tactics are best for each stage of the buyer journey. You need a mixture of touchpoints, not just one. Events, for instance, are great but an event might be third base [in a baseball analogy], but you have to get to first and second base before that, right?” Don’t be afraid to fail.  “You’re not saving lives, you’re learning along with everyone else. Don’t tell people that MTA is going to give them some magic path. it’s a tool they need to learn how to use well, like any other tool.” It’s also important that leadership gives space for people to fail and learn from those failures, in a process of continuous learning. MTA is a journey, not a destination.  “You’re not going to be done, ever. There’s always going to be something more that you want to know, a gap you’ll want to fill. And I’m sure the technology will continue to evolve as well,” concludes Gardiner. Achieving peak performance is a bit like chasing the sun. You may never reach it, but the journey is eminently worthwhile. Reach out to us  to learn more about how your organization can begin – or optimize – a journey towards multi-touch attribution! Update: Listen to Carmen Gardiner share 5 of these lessons – and more insights – with Sojourn’s Dan Vawter via our (now) on-demand webinar “ 5 lessons learned: How Progress improved its marketing with multi-touch attribution. “

When COVID-19 struck in March, 2020, Quest Diagnostics wasn’t completely prepared (nobody was), but its marketing team had been collaborating with Sojourn Solutions to streamline its marketing technology. As a result, Quest was able to rapidly scale up its customer engagement during a global health crisis, when demand for its testing services skyrocketed. During a recent webinar hosted by Oracle - 5 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Marketing Automation  - Quest’s Christopher Crowe, Director of Digital Marketing, and Karin Pindle, Senior Marketing Automation Consultant at Sojourn Solutions, told the full story. The Problem: Too much complexity, too many silos Crowe began by describing the disjointed, complicated state of their marketing ops prior to its collaboration with Sojourn, which kicked off in 2018. “Back then, Quest had multiple marketing automation platforms with minimal integration with our CRM,” explained Crowe, and all this complexity created a number of problems, including: Limited internal capability and a reliance on external agencies, which was costly and inefficient; Silos were limiting Quest’s ability to gain insights from its data and manage leads -- more cross-team sharing of leads and insights was needed; A multiplicity of platforms and silos were creating confusion and a lack of efficiency for the in-house marketing teams. Best practices and lessons learned weren’t being shared effectively. Things had to change, and they reached out to Sojourn to help streamline marketing operations in order to drive more integration (of tech and teams) and more efficiency. The chosen solution: One MAP (Eloqua) Quest and Sojourn examined where the diagnostics company was, i.e., an inefficient and confusing place, and mapped out where they wanted to go in the future. Crowe sketched out what they wanted: A centralized “center of enablement” that all in-house Quest Diagnostics' marketers could draw upon for resources and support, one that would support cross-team collaboration as well as sharing of data, leads, and best practices; A reduction in the time and the cost involved for launching campaigns, including less reliance on external agencies; Clear lead flows into the appropriate CRMs, helping Sales and Marketing alignment; Increased maturity to support more campaigns and more campaign complexity. What became clear after these discussions about goals was that Quest “needed a single MAP flexible enough to offer all this functionality and also integrate with CRMs,” said Crowe.  Quest and Sojourn agreed on migrating the organization to Eloqua , largely because, as Crowe explained, “Eloqua checked all the boxes for us in addressing our needs,” providing a single, centralized source of truth and customer engagement. Crowe noted that “the Eloqua campaign canvas is so user friendly that our people could get comfortable using it quickly.” In addition, healthcare companies like Quest must comply with strict regulations around patient privacy: Eloqua has great tools for HIPAA [the patient privacy act] compliance compared to other MAPs. Implementing the solution With the goals of the collaboration clearly defined and a chosen MAP in Eloqua, Quest and Sojourn began implementing the solution. They started migrating the multiplicity of data and campaign assets contained in multiple MAPs into Eloqua. As Pindle explained, this required numerous steps, such as the consolidation and streamlining of Quest's in-house marketing processes, bringing the entire, confusing array of multi-MAP instances into Eloqua (with just a few Eloqua instances) as “a single source of truth,” cleaning the data, and improving lead management so more and better leads could be funneled to Sales. Pindle explained exactly how Sojourn approaches MAP migrations with a clear 4-step process: (1) plan and organize to identify exactly what data/assets need to be migrated and when; (2) set up, with APIs saving clients 75% on time and cost to migrate data/assets; (3) testing -- “we use humans to test everything,” Pindle explained; and (4) go live -- “we monitored Eloqua for Quest to quickly resolve any issues that might arise.” Of course, the migration and transformation process took time, but by the time the pandemic struck in 2020, Quest was in a great position to pivot and scale up its customer engagement with Eloqua.  Results: Quest Diagnostics pivots & scales B2B Marketing during a crisis Crowe explained that the 3-year collaboration with Sojourn and Oracle has made Quest a more streamlined and more productive marketing operation. The newly-implemented Eloqua MAP “helps us get the right message to the right customer at the right time,” said Crowe. ”Even though we’re running a much higher volume of campaigns and we sent 40 million emails in 2020, our campaign costs have gone down, so we’re doing more with less.” Campaigns are now easier for our people to create and develop using Eloqua, said Crowe, and they were able to ramp up customer engagement at a time when customer demand for their testing service was surging. In the end, says Crowe, ‘we’ve seen significant gains across multiple revenue measures” and “we continue to use Eloqua to create rich customer experiences.” Today Quest has greatly increased its in-house capability, relying much less on expensive agencies to fill gaps in its capabilities (gaps that no longer exist). What’s next: Driving more efficiency Chris Crowe and Quest Diagnostics, with the ongoing help of Sojourn Solutions, continue to drive benefits and cost efficiencies using Eloqua, strengthening lead generation and alignment between marketing and sales, while enhancing personalization and CX in its approach to customer engagement. Quest has effectively navigated an unprecedented pandemic and is ready to handle whatever happens next. Want to learn more about how your organization can drive more efficiency and future-proof your marketing operations, just as Quest Diagnostics did? Reach out to us here .   About Quest Diagnostics New Jersey-based  Quest Diagnostics  (QD) is a leader in healthcare testing, offering an extensive menu of testing services that include COVID-19 testing. The Fortune 500 company has some 44,000 employees around the US, and engages a wide range of customers in both the B2C and B2B spaces.

Founded in 1851, UK-based Reuters  is the world’s largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide each day. Reuters provides business, financial, national and international news to professionals via desktop terminals, global media organizations, industry events and directly to consumers.  Brief overview: A disjointed Demand Gen infrastructure The media company had a fractured demand generation digital infrastructure when a large part of its business was “spun out” to become Refinitiv . To plan and execute campaigns, Reuters required time-consuming, error-prone manual operations, and struggled to track campaign performance and gain full visibility into its customers’ journey.  Reuters had 10 different websites and 120 forms. Every time Reuters had an email campaign, for example, it had to build a new audience (email list) manually from scratch by pulling email addresses from disjointed systems and loading spreadsheets into Eloqua. Moreover, there wasn’t a single strategy and plan that addressed the multiple stages of the buying journey, let alone alignment with sales.  When  Juan Mejia  arrived as Director of Demand Generation in February, 2020, Reuters’ goal was the transformation of its disjointed infrastructure - integrating its digital assets, unifying its website, and connecting all customer data to its Salesforce CRM and Eloqua MAP. Ultimately, Mejia and his team completed the project in about 6 months, during a global pandemic, and in a remote work environment.  Reuters’ digital transformation strategy Because a large part of Reuters’ business was being “spun out” into an independent entity ( Refinitiv ), almost everything on the demand gen side needed to be rebuilt and reconfigured. Reuters’ infrastructure was disjointed, lacking the integration required to provide either a unified vision of the customer journey or alignment with Sales.  “We had no visibility into our customer’s journey across the funnel and we couldn't measure anything,” said Mejia. All the measures Reuters used were isolated within different channels and disconnected systems. “We’d send out a campaign and since our 10 websites with their 120 different forms and our various social media assets had isolated metrics, we couldn't connect the dots to determine how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) we were generating or where those leads were coming from or what content might have driven them.” The strategy was to ultimately create an always-on program.  In the beginning of 2020, Reuters was restructuring their marketing team and created a new team for Demand Generation. As part of that process, they carried out an assessment with an external consulting company that allowed the new Director of Demand Generation to decide how to help shape the infrastructure.   Objectives of transformation The objective was to create and deliver an end-to-end always on digital demand generation strategy. One that drove incremental marketing impacted revenue for the business using all digital channels and stages of the customer journey. Reuters also worked on sales and marketing alignment by defining a new integrated marketing and sales funnel. This would allow the teams to better understand performance across the entire process. Ultimately, Reuters needed to transform its disjointed demand gen infrastructure into an integrated demand generation engine supported by its Eloqua MAP connected to its Salesforce CRM. The team also needed to integrate all the other systems and platforms involved, including: website, paid media, online events, interactive content and more. Reuters simply had too many manual operations for launching campaigns. The objectives included unifying Reuters’ 10 websites into one, enabling it to collect all customer data in both CRM and MAP as “a single source of truth” to enable campaign planning, execution, and reporting/attribution. Reuters also had to standardize its customer tracking and reporting, allowing it to continuously monitor and improve demand generation efforts. “We created an Always On program that aligned to the stages of the buying journey for each of our products including: email, website, social media assets, paid search - all of which were consolidated and connected to our Salesforce CRM and Eloqua MAP,” said Mejia. Working with Sojourn Solutions, the Reuters team integrated and standardized/harmonized its assets and infrastructure, gaining a unified view of its customers across channels (omnichannel visibility), as well as automating its campaigns. Reuters could measure channel effectiveness and boost ROI (for example, evaluating the efficiency of paid search).  Results Reuters built an integrated, automated demand generation engine that fuels improved campaign planning, execution, and attribution, as well as closer alignment between marketing and sales. By aligning all channels through a newly-mapped customer journey, they created an always-on program that includes paid and organic media, website, email automation, and more, delivering on a 70% growth in marketing generated revenue between 2019 and 2020 . The newly-built Reuters demand gen engine provides: Targeting . Data has given Reuters a better understanding of its customers and enabled improved targeting. “Where before we’d send campaigns of 200,000 emails, all with the same message,” explains Mejia, “now we can get more targeted by messaging micro-segments of 5,000 customers.” Alignment.  Pre-transformation, someone from Sales would make a request and marketing would merely execute the order. Marketing is now a data-powered partner that consults with Sales on strategy, tactics, and funnel optimization.  Automation. Most of the campaigns Reuters ran pre-transformation were product specific (often email blasts). Now Reuters has shifted to “always-on” nurturing campaigns based on customer behavioral data. As Mejia explains: “the always-on is essentially an ongoing, customer-informed journey where we respond to customer intent signals with relevant content.” Attribution.  Reuters can now connect demand gen investments to ROI. “Before the change,” says Mejia, “we might have been losing money for months without even knowing it.” Now Reuters can track results, as well as optimize spend and tactics on the go. Marketing has also gained more credibility and influence with senior leadership. Timescale and milestones Eloqua Design and Implementation Launch, Phase 1 & 2: Q2 & Q3 2020  Lead Scoring: Q2 2020 Integrated Sales & Marketing Funnel Design & Implementation: Q2-Q4 2020 New Multichannel Campaigns Launch: Q2 2020 New Integrated Website Launch: Q3 2020 Always On Launch: Q3 2020  Automated Data Cleansing: Q4 2020 Integrations for ON24, Splash, Hive9, Tableau: Q4 2020 SFDC Sales & Marketing Dashboards: Q1 2021 Reporting Insight, Measurement and Enhancing: ONGOING Customer summary  “We've built a demand generation machine nearly from scratch, completely changing the role of demand gen. Before, we were a tactical team that just responded to business requests and had very limited ability to demonstrate value. Today, we’re a strategic partner who creates significant value for our customers and for Reuters.” -- Juan Mejia, Demand Generation Director, Reuters To learn more about how your organization, like Reuters, can build a demand generation engine to improve revenues and marketing performance, reach out  to us today.

Data is the fuel that powers modern marketing, enabling better understanding of customer needs that leads to better engagement, better content, accurate measurement, and better marketing ROI. Data by itself is useless, however, without a mature data management infrastructure of people, processes, and technology to turn raw data into actionable insight that drives engagement and revenues. Our “Data & Insight" series focuses on building that mature data infrastructure.   Data & Insight have become more important than ever, especially given today’s rapidly changing market and customer behaviors – as well as today’s more complex digital environments – including the crumbling of third-party cookies.  The essential role and “fit” of Data & Insights into the Marketing Operations triangle of people, processes, and technology is anchored in use cases, which are prioritized based on business needs. Data & Insights are meaningless unless they support a specific, measurable, and revenue-connected goal. Yes, strategy comes into play at a higher level where you define where your organization wants to go and how you want to get there.  Your use cases inform what Data & Insights you need and how you’ll leverage them. Without use cases, you’d be operating in chaos and/or at status quo, only able to react instead of proactively driving measurable results with data and insights.  Data use cases: Driving revenues and continuous improvement The ultimate goal of leveraging data and insights is being able to predict and grow pipeline and revenue, and continuously improve your marketing effectiveness. One of the dependencies of continuous improvement is the ability to measure and benchmark exactly where you are at any given time. Another key expectation is gaining a unified view of contacts that reflects all interactions across all channels.  For many Marketing organizations, getting from here to there with their data infrastructure requires a significant investment in time and resources. It’s a heavily cross-functional approach that can require a massive paradigm shift in how Marketing organizations operate within themselves and within the larger business organization. There could be countless use cases under the umbrella of these larger, strategic goals, depending on where you are in your data maturity. Status quo as the biggest obstacle The biggest challenge to improving and maturing your data and insight capabilities is the status quo, because an organization’s desire to change must be greater than its desire to stay the same. The legacy mindsets that say, “that’s the way we’ve always done things” represent huge hurdles to overcome, especially when compounded with other challenges such as a low value associated with data in general, little to no action on insights, silo’ed functions, and beyond. Even if you somehow move past the “inertia” challenge, without a strong culture of collaboration and teamwork in place, you’ll still be faced with finger-pointing, lack of cross-functional communication and/or lack of communicating marketing’s value to the larger business organization in terms they can understand (i.e., pipeline and revenue).  4 steps to an improved data infrastructure Change is never easy and rarely linear, but you need to begin somewhere. Here’s how: 1. Business cases will be needed as the context for any defined data and insights initiative. Each business case should identify and ideally quantify the pain points and costs created by the data and insight challenges you currently face – and when I say “quantify,” I mean that the numbers must show value that’s in alignment with business impacts such as time savings, cost savings, lead creation, pipeline growth, and/or revenue impact. After you’ve brainstormed those business cases for your organization, they should be prioritized.  2. In a best-case scenario, change to the status quo would need to be driven by an executive-level Champion who brings a cross-functional mindset to driving measurable impact and who defines business case priorities, including the clearing of obstacles as needed. Since data is cross-functional in how it’s collected and leveraged, initiatives involving data must be cross-functional and have top-down support. 3. Once a business case has been presented, and received approval, a formal project plan should be built, resources assigned (having been addressed in the business case), and timelines agreed to.  4. I’d strongly suggest reaching out to us for a complimentary data review with our Sojourn team in order to help you identify opportunities to create the most value from your data and systems, and get on the right starting path to improvement. An example of Data & Insight transformation We worked with a healthcare client a few years ago that engaged us for a digital transformation project. One of the executives felt that a CDP would be the best way to solve their many challenges around data and insights.  Once we came into the project and studied their goals and resources, we realized that the organization was lacking a full integration of their core systems (MAP, CRM, ERP) causing: (1) lots of unneeded manual work such as data exports for targeting, analysis, reporting, etc. and (2) leaving many silos across the client’s functions and teams, as well as their martech and their data. Our recommendation was a plan to optimize their core systems integration, providing them with a nearly 360 degree view of their customers. In the end, we saved them an annual cost of roughly $750K in new technology, resources, and projects that the business wasn’t in a position to correctly implement and support anyway. By integrating their core systems and teams, they also developed more cross-finctional capability in how they leveraged data and insights to engage their customers and generate pipeline/revenues.  Optimizing your Data & Insight capabilities You must understand where you are now in order to get where you want to be. I’d recommend starting with some sort of Assessment (directional), Discovery (deeper directional), or Health Check (more diagnostic) in order to: (1) baseline/benchmark your current state of play regarding data and insight capabilities, and  (2) build consensus and adoption to move forward aligned to an agreed-upon maturity roadmap for data and insight. For more insight and help in improving your data quality and data management maturity, reach out  to us today.

Data is the fuel that powers modern marketing, enabling better understanding of customer needs that leads to better engagement, better content, better marketing tools/approaches, and more revenue generation. Data by itself is useless, however, without a mature data management infrastructure of people, processes, and technology to turn raw data into actionable insight that drives engagement and ROI. Our “Data and Insight Series” focuses on building that mature data infrastructure.   “Data & Insight maturity” can be defined as an ongoing journey towards improving and increasing a Marketing organization’s capabilities in leveraging data and insight. To achieve a high level of data and insight maturity, both data and insights must be fully incorporated into all decision-making and practices. Getting from where you are now to where you want to be is a process . . . Step one: Understanding where you are today  In helping our clients grow their data and insight maturity, we’ve created defined levels of maturity, with key milestones and metrics associated with each level of maturity. Our maturity model includes four levels and it helps give our customers a common baseline to understand where they’re at today based upon their assessment responses. The model also identifies what is “ideal” within each level, providing a clearly defined path for improvements, and a set of metrics to help quantify those improvements.    Improving maturity: some areas of focus More data and insight maturity means having more capability with your data, which helps you drive revenues and pipeline. Here are some specific areas where organizations typically focus their maturity efforts: Data integration. If your data is not integrated and made available to others across the organization and your systems, it’s not ready for prime time – you’ll need to plan and build key integrations to most effectively leverage your data to drive success. Data analysis and optimization. What data do you have available to fuel analysis? Is your available data accurate and relevant? Garbage in typically means garbage out. What additional data might you need to gain more accurate, fuller insights? Data Privacy and Data Compliance. Are your data practices compliant with existing and emerging data privacy requirements such as GDPR? If not, you could be facing penalties, and also end up losing the confidence/trust of your customers, who are increasingly concerned that their data privacy gets respected and protected. Approaches to growing data and insight maturity Of course, every client organization is different. Knowledge and experience count a lot when it comes to working on improving your data and insights maturity. That said, a “typical” diagnostic approach would be to start asking the right people the right questions, which would include: What’s going on now with your data and insight capabilities? What’s working and what’s not working? What’s on your “wish list?” What specific capabilities do you want to develop or improve?  What are Marketing’s priorities? What are Marketing’s use cases aligned to these priorities? What are the organization’s priorities? What are the organization’s use cases aligned to these priorities? How are you measuring success? How would you like to measure success? With these answers in hand, and after some deep analysis and follow-up, we can begin to map out what’s important, what’s not as important, what are the potential quick wins/”low-hanging fruit,” what needs to get put on the maturity roadmap, what resources are required to drive change, what timelines should be considered, and what investments are needed.  Finally, you’re able to move from planning your roadmap to achieving measurable improvements in your data and insights maturity. It’s important to begin this journey with a clear destination in mind. Your overall business strategy and goals will inform the use cases you solve for, and those use cases will inform the choices you make around technology and data, and how tech and data get deployed. Driving maturity: Pulling it all together Your stakeholders need to be working from the same playbook, meaning that your Marketing Operations people and your Marketing-at-large people are aligned around the maturity roadmap/plan and how it’s being executed, which should (of course) align with your business strategy and specific use cases. This is typically best addressed through a structured approach to change management and continuous communication, as well as by the stakeholders agreeing upon a common set of metrics and processes.  Ultimately, the goal would be to develop a cross-functional data governance model to monitor and improve your data and insight maturity.  It’s a journey, not a destination While there are key milestones along the way to data and insight maturity, based on your roadmap, the work should be considered ongoing in the same way that your customer experience and even your company performance is an ongoing, iterative process of improvement. Once you’ve reached one level or milestone, there’s always more to be done, even if that’s “just” monitoring and maintenance.  It makes good business sense to prioritize projects and actions on your maturity roadmap, always aligned with your business goals and your Marketing goals. There must be a clear and agreed-upon vision of what success looks like and clear accountability from the top down to drive the maturity process forward.  For help in improving your data quality and data management maturity, reach out  to us today.