A CMO-Friendly Data Warehousing Checklist

March 30, 2011 By Heather Fletcher

multipage

Chief marketing officers are being asked more and more to show what measurable results are coming out of their efforts. But, for some, a solid foundation must first be laid by getting all the organizational data in one place and metric-ready.

To that end on March 2, Needham, Mass.-based marketing software provider Visual IQ released the whitepaper "10 Steps to Enterprise Marketing Measurement: A Marketing Executive Checklist." Meant to be CMO-friendly, the checklist takes these organizational leaders step by step through the process. Below is a synopsis of the advice:

→ Define a data collection and storage approach. "You need to make a decision as to how you are going to collect your advertising, response and customer (ARC) data from all the disparate sources where it currently resides (search engines, ad networks, your CRM system/customer database, in store POS systems, in-house spreadsheets, etc.) and decide where you are going to consolidate and centralize an enterprise wide view of that data.

"This 'data warehouse' can grab all your marketing campaign data, website performance data, planning data, syndicated third party data and customer data from its multiple sources in order to enable a better understanding of the synergies, impacts and influences of each campaign and channel (both online and offline) on the other."

→ Define the key performance indicators (KPIs). "This 'Ends-to-Means' approach starts with defining the high level business decisions that need to be made across your entire organization as a result of your marketing performance, and then identifying the granular level data needed to support those decisions. For example, if one of your business goals is to improve the marketing ROI on a given product line, you need to collect marketing costs and the resulting revenue broken down by product line and then use those two metrics to calculate the ROI by product line as your KPI. You also must commit to calculating/reporting on the same KPIs across all your channels or campaigns in order to compare the effectiveness of every channel/campaign against each other in an apples-to-apples fashion.

"In order to take this ends-to-means approach you must involve representatives/stakeholders from all the function areas of the business who will be using the data to support decisions in pursuit of their goals."

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