Is a question that many businesses have defaulted to in order to understand where customers are coming from. However, when it comes to multichannel marketing, customers’ answers to that question can be misleading. Why? When a customer has several touchpoints with a business, they might not even remember how they first became aware of the brand. Was it the paid Google ad? Or did they stumble upon a blog post? Did a friend mention it? Which one actually came first? When asked, customers will likely give into the psychological concept of the “economy of effort,” meaning they opt for the easiest or most straightforward answer to save time and energy.
That gives businesses and their agencies faulty data about how customers actually got there, which makes it that much tougher to prove ROI of various channels and even entire campaigns. Analytics Aren’t Unified Today, effective marketing is all about data, data, data. Agencies have access to more information than ever before — but simply having the data isn’t the bulk sms service same as actually using it to make decisions and prove your value to your clients. Unfortunately, 29% of small businesses say they don’t like working with external agencies because they don’t have any analytics to back up their value propositions. Research from Gartner found that marketers say that data influences only 54% of marketing decisions.
So where are things falling apart here? If we have the analytics, why aren’t we using them? For many agency teams, it’s a lack of accessibility and unification. Marketers use an average of 12 tools (yikes!) to support data-driven marketing, which means the information they need to demonstrate the ROI of their clients’ multichannel campaigns is spread through various dashboards, spreadsheets, and platforms. In short: Getting the analytics they need is time-consuming, cumbersome,