Three Steps to Managing Marketing ROI

We are inviting our Powered By partners to share their knowledge, insight and tips & tricks on how to monetize data and turn it into business advantage.  

The first partner guest blog comes from the Chief Revenue Officer, Roger, at our partner, Allocadia.  Allocadia has made it its mission to demystify Marketing ROI.  Here is their advice on how to achieve it in 3 steps. We hope you enjoy it!

Three Steps to Managing Marketing ROI

During Dreamforce 2012 late last month, we were delighted to join GoodData and Get Satisfaction for a joint breakout session, How to Generate Revenue from Your Data.  In this blog, I wanted to share some of the topics of discussion that came up during our presentation.

Throughout my career, I have worked with many clients to help them gain visibility into their marketing investments.  My company, Allocadia offers a SaaS solution that helps marketers plan, track and measure their marketing investments. We help our customers save money by gaining visibility into,  and aligning marketing spend.  This enables our customers to generate revenue by measuring ROI on marketing investments and redistributing spend to more effective channels.

Here are 3 tips to generate revenue from your data that we shared during our Dreamforce session:

1.    Choose a framework to build a data model.
Turning unstructured data into structured insights is not magic.  A data model or framework must be determined in order to ‘hang’ all the data sources on.  At Allocadia, we believe that, for marketing, the investment plan is the best framework.  Budget and planning is done at the beginning of the year, with new products, business units, regions, and media taken into account within the basic budget structure.  Start with the marketing budget, and plan a framework that is ready on day one for data feeds.

2.    Map all the data sources.
A partial data feed is not enough.  In order to have a holistic view of marketing investments and returns, all spend needs to be accounted for, whether it is online, offline, or relates to other activities (PR, etc.). For example, PR spend may impact search results, and photography invoices may be included in display advertising costs.  A marketing investment framework includes all marketing budgets and actuals (with metadata – i.e. segment, product, region, objective, etc.). The last data source layer is the ‘return’ data that comes from sources mapped to the marketing spend by campaign – for example CRM, web analytics, marketing automation, or Google Analytics.

3.    Visualize the results.
Visualization is the foundation of Allocadia’s partnership with GoodData.  A solid BI engine with leading-edge visualization, UX (user experience) and incredible ease-of-use is required to truly gain insight into your data. The ability to reconfigure, filter and drill down into the data leads to truly informed and fast decisions.

Beyond these 3 tips, I added one more requirement when talking with clients, consultants and vendors at Dreamforce.

4.    Compared to what? Have a model or benchmark as reference.

It’s great to have a framework full of data and a great tool to mine the information, but to go to the next level of optimization something to compare it to is required.  Then you’ll be able to answer questions such as: ‘Are we exceeding the corporate plan?’, or ‘Are we a best in class marketing organization?’

We are enabling marketing departments to gain the ability to manage by the numbers. It is Allocadia’s and GoodData’s solutions that are making it happen.

Roger is the Chief Customer Officer at Allocadia.  Roger has held numerous senior executive leadership positions including VP of Customer Service at Kodak, EAMER. Roger excels at driving deep-rooted customer adoption by helping companies develop streamlined processes that support business objectives. Roger has a deep understanding of the marketing applications market, and as a result, he is able to work closely with Allocadia customers to implement Marketing ROI best-practices, ensure customer satisfaction, as well as identify and articulate market requirements that translate into a leading-edge product. Roger holds an Executive MBA from Simon Fraser University.