If you are conducting complex marketing operations on the Enterprise level, you probably are using at least a half dozen different marketing technology (martech) applications to run your CRM, demand generation, advertising, search marketing and so on. The data that is generated from these martech tools is rich with value for your business, but it is more often than not isolated in different silos. “It’s very difficult to make a call and go ‘Oh this is going really well, let’s spend more money on that. Oh this is not going so well, people are getting bounced out of the landing page, and I can tell the user experience has suffered.’” So says Ann Sung Ruckstuhl, CMO of performance analytics leader SOASTA.  On this episode of Moneyball for Marketing, Ann takes us through the challenges CMOs face integrating marketing data in real time and the extraordinary opportunities for monetization that await those who are able to integrate data in real time. Highlights are as follows:

Starship Enterprise: Ann describes the inefficiency and frustration of toggling between various martech applications for different parts of the marketing mix, and highlights the need for CMOs to have their own enterprise marketing ‘starship’ that coordinates the performance metrics from a half dozen or more different data sources, in real time. She offers her prioritization of the three key aspects of a good marketing information system.

Monetization Optimization: How can CMOs do the above? Ann says you “start with tagging (your) website in javascript,” citing the surprisingly low 1% that she says Google Analytics uses as a traffic sample size. “Thanks to cloud computing …you actually can track every single user now and it’s very cost effective.” Ann explains how large clients like Nordstrom use martech to “understand in real time what’s happening, what is their most profitable user visit path, what time of the day they have peak monetization,” and even explains how to tackle 18,000 different Android device variables!

Holy War: Looking to the future, Ann cites what she calls the “holy trinity” of marketing information systems—User, IT and Business, coming together. She predicts the Network Operations Center being replaced by the Digital Operations Center—“a huge war room that consists of multiple screens…you should be able to share the same view…identify problems and fix them in real time….You have the three key parties coming together and working off…the same sheet.”

 
Read the full transcript here