I came across an interesting article on the Hubspot blog the other day called 7 Essential Roles of the Modern Marketing Department. It basically described the key types of people that you need on any given marketing team in today’s complex marketing environment to succeed. The roles range from the visionary at the top to story tellers, editors, etc. The most important one in my mind though is the analyst role that is discussed.
The blog says this about the analyst:
“. . . the analyst role is the person who measures the results of the content strategy. Working closely with the visionary and project manager he/she is skilled in the use of analytics tools including marketing automation software like HubSpot, analytics tool like Google Analytics, social listening technology like Crimson Hexagon and good old fashion spreadsheets. This person should be capable of gleaning meaningful business insights out of an abundance of data to help the visionary make informed decisions.”
I think the final sentence in the description does a great job getting to the crux of what a marketing analyst / scientist / operations person needs to do. Marketing teams need to have someone who can use the available technologies to understand how every marketing program affects revenue across all the different segments, which programs bring in the most net-new names, how the marketing-sales hand-off works in the demand generation funnel, and more. Without critical insights like these it is impossible for the visionary or anyone else on the team to understand if their programs are actually working and how to plan for the future.
However, I am a little surprised that CRM is not mentioned in the technologies that marketing analysts work with. Marketing analysts need to be able to use reports and dashboards in CRM systems like Salesforce because that is where the sales and executive teams are looking at the data. It is critical to have marketing information captured there to keep the rest of the company aligned with what marketing is doing. In fact many of our customers actually track all of their marketing results in Salesforce because of the ability to track data in real-time and drill down into each individual record. Plus it is much easier to accurately track the complete demand generation funnel across both departments because you can easily identify bottlenecks in the marketing-sales hand off and also ensure that marketing has visibility into how sales follows up with the leads that get passed over.
The bottom line is that without marketers who are in the weeds with the marketing data and can provide actionable insights into campaign performance it is impossible for the rest of the marketing team to operate at peak effectiveness. So when looking to build out this crucial part of the marketing team make sure that you not only find the right people but also the right technologies that enable the marketing analysts to get the information that needed to make informed decisions and accurately plan and forecast for the future.
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