Thinking Like A Marketer

My Cozy Marketing Office Just Got Crowded

When planning out my career in marketing and digital analytics, I thought about a cozy office in the marketing department. Maybe even something work from home that required a few chats with the fellow marketers and supervisors here and there. I think about website traffic, clicks, conversions, social media engagement, and whether a campaign actually worked. However, I have come to realize that the data collected from a digital marketing campaign can be useful to much more than just us in the marketing department. Other departments also need to be able to understand customers, recognize patterns and problems, and make better decisions.

Breaking Down the Silos

One concept that stood out to me was the hub-and-spoke method discussed in Cult of Analytics (2016). This method discusses breaking down organizational silos and encouraging information to move across departments. Instead of each department collecting information and keeping it, digital analytics professionals can operate within a “hub” to connect information to different “spokes” or departments throughout the organization.

One Campaign, Multiple Uses

The data from the marketing department launching a new digital campaign should be packaged to provide valuable information to other departments. These same data sets will help the sales department, customer service department, and other departments in the organization reach their goals. Sales may discover a new lead to follow and increase revenue based off of a new discovered demographic. The IT or Web department may be interested in how long customers are staying on the website. This is taking one campaign and utilizing it in different departments to better the organization.

Looking Beyond the Marketing Department

Jackson (2016) emphasizes the importance of connecting analytics with the needs of the organization. This suggests other departments should be considered when in the process of starting a new digital campaign. If marketers understand what other departments need to know when launching a campaign, they can establish goals and metrics that provide useful information across departments, influence decisions, and provide the company with a better picture of its customers. How much valuable customer information do you think companies miss when departments focus only on their own data instead of sharing what they learn?