Top 3 Ways to Optimize Your Marketing Spend

Did you know that nearly a third of today’s marketing budgets are going to marketing technology? That’s just one of the many interesting insights from Gartner’s recent survey on marketing spending. Gartner found that marketing departments are purchasing all kinds of new software, like email marketing and customer relationship management software or content management and marketing analytics platforms. And as marketing departments begin to focus more strongly on marketing technology, we’re seeing several major impacts.

First major impact with new marketing technology purchases: siloed data.

The adoption of new marketing technology like email marketing, customer relationship management, and content management software generates valuable new data that can be used to better target customers and overall optimize marketing spend. However, that valuable data is also stuck in those tools.

Another major impact is a redundancy across marketing analytics tools.

With data becoming so valuable to marketing efforts, there is no shortage of new marketing analytics tools promising to gather data and analyze it. There are free ones like Google Analytics and paid ones like MixPanel or KissMetrics. Each tool has different strengths and weaknesses, leaving marketing teams using multiple analytic tools to help understand their data and maximize campaign results.

What does this mean? Less money left over for actual digital marketing!

With all this time and money spent on redundant tools and trapped data, companies are struggling with their digital marketing efforts. But, not all is lost. There are three ways to optimize your marketing spend that you might not be thinking about, namely putting siloed data to work, maximizing the return on technology investments, and reducing analytics costs. Let’s dive in and talk about each one of these a bit more.

1. Optimizing campaigns using siloed data

If you can pull together all of the siloed data from various marketing tools and combine it with data from other applications—like Salesforce, Zendesk, or even Twilio—then you’ll be able to gain the kind of deep insights that allow you to better segment and target your campaigns. Imagine being able to take your most successful customers from Salesforce, coupled with top performing campaign channels and your best content, to create the ultimate combination of segmenting, targeting, and engagement. All of that data combined makes powerful analytics that no single marketing tool can ever provide.

“The best thing GoodData has done for Say Insurance is enabling holistic analysis that was out of our reach before.” - Marc Deiter Director of Say Insurance

2. Maximizing your marketing technology ROI

Take a look at all of your marketing technology and analytics tools and ask yourself: Is this combination redundant, underperforming, or just too complex? Is it helping your team plan or discover the kind of insights that drive revenue? Instead of buying different marketing analytics tools to serve specific needs, consider maximizing your marketing technology ROI by investing in a single data and analytics platform. It gives you the flexibility to expand your marketing analytics to serve all of your end users—regardless of technical skill level—and it evolves as your analytics and marketing technology stack changes, eliminating the need for multiple tools or continual replacement of older solutions.

“We needed another way to find out more about who our customers are and what they really need. To be able to grow quickly while providing excellent customer service is going to require forecasting and robust data analysis to support that growth.” - Mike Terry, Business Analyst, Say Insurance

3. Reducing your analytics costs

Analytics is critical for marketing teams and should be embedded into all processes and workflows. It is so important that marketing departments are investing in hiring marketing BI managers and analysts to connect all those siloed data sources and build out reports to support the various marketing reporting needs. This creates a backlog of custom requests for the technical team, and it prevents the marketing team from utilizing analytics to the best of their ability.

By implementing reusable metrics and easy data discovery, you can reduce the costs of building and managing personalized analytics and custom reports. This helps eliminate the overhead of hiring more internal BI teams to support the growing demand and the need to buy additional specialized marketing analytics tools.

Spending a third of your marketing budget on new tools may not be the best investment, especially when those tools result in siloed, redundant data. For companies looking to make more of an impact with their marketing efforts, the best way forward involves thinking more broadly, connecting the tools you already have and investing in technology that will allow you to make the most of the current applications in place. An data analytics platform is a great option for companies looking for help making sense of piles of marketing data and dozens of different tools, and it can also slowly eliminate the need for those other tools, saving the company money in the long run.