Maybe You Already Have Enough Data for Analytics: Part II: More Insight With Touch Analysis

In my last post, I described marketing touch analysis and how to use this information to “do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.” Today, I add more variety to the approach and explain how to gain better insight into the effectiveness of your marketing tactics. I promise to keep the rocket science out of this discussion to help you better understand what this stuff is and how it can help you with your work. There are pragmatic ways you can take advantage of these techniques without a staff of scientists.

If you have data that tells you who touched what tactic and when, you have what’s called a “time series” of data. The more information you add to this data, the more you can get out of it. For example, if you know the role or persona of each person in your time series, you can begin to isolate the tactics more commonly used by one persona vs. another. If you can define groups of buyers who are related to each other (e.g. all the individuals in a company who interacted with marketing efforts that resulted in closed deals), you can compare how tactics correlate with closed deals over time. Other types of information that might lead to useful insight are the buyer’s geographical data, company information and industry. The more information you have, the more easily you can segment buyers into groups that can be compared. For example, you could compare the effectiveness of telemarketing invitations to events across different industries and conclude that one industry is more receptive than another to a particular approach.

Be careful to avoid creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all you do with a specific persona is invite individuals who match that persona to one type of event, then your data will show that they are interacting with these events. If you include a variety of tactics in your mix, you can compare their impact.

Another area that requires careful consideration is attributing the impact of specific tactics to a deal or group of deals. Attribution can be calculated in all sorts of ways, some better than others. Marketing automation platforms and sales force automation systems are becoming more sophisticated in this area, but often they look at the first or last touch as the causal event that triggered the opportunity. A better (but not perfect) approach is to weight the different tactics, although it is hard to determine the relative impact of one tactic over another. Scoring models can be used to assign weights as well.

In my next post, I will discuss a more-sophisticated method for assessing the impact of different tactics.