As a marketer, how can you decrease your IT dependency - A step by step guide
In our data driven marketing world, every marketer needs to stick to data. It is easy to claim oneself as a data driven marketer. However, for marketers to become data driven or data centric, they need to shorten the distance between them and the data. Decreasing IT dependency is the first thing to achieve on the way; otherwise, time wasted waiting for data will prevent you from taking necessary agile marketing actions. Dramatically, you will get stuck between the choice of taking data-driven slow actions or gut feeling based fast actions. In Armut, one step at a time, we were able to achieve the best of both worlds and become both, fast and agile in our marketing activities! How? we succeeded in decreasing our IT dependency. Here is our step by step guide to inspire you in your journey:
Cut the middleman between you and data
Start by ensuring you are in a position that enables you to reach data directly. In other words, cut the middleman between you and data. Generally speaking, the more steps separating you from your target, the harder it becomes to achieve it. And since in this case your first target is data, you need to be able to reach data directly. Think about your regular day, if you have to ask and wait for data from IT or BI, it will waste your time and block you from being agile. In fact, when working on new user segment or campaign performance analysis or churn and RFM analysis, the means do not matter, what matters is actually getting there!
The most effective and efficient means to cut the middleman is by learning and being comfortable with SQL. Since companies tend to archive their databases in SQL server, learning SQL and eventually being able to pull data directly from the database has become an essential role of data driven marketers. IT teams may resist permitting you database access; however, proving your ability to use and analyse data will definitely convince them. If you are granted your access permit, congratulations, you have cut the middleman :)
Be your own webmaster
As a digital marketer, your favorite colleagues will always be your web analytics tools. Every time we try to analyse something in our web pages, we base our analysis on our web analytics tools’ input. As a marketer whose work mainly depends on web analytics data, you need to have power over how this data is being collected. Moreover, while analysing this data, you need to understand its source or else you cannot be sure of your analysis; more dramatically, you may end up analysing the wrong data and not be aware of it.
To have power over your web analytics tools, you need to take full responsibility of the implementation of web analytics tools. At this point, using a tag management tool, such as Google Tag Manager, is the smartest choice. Tag management tools enable you to add/delete tag on site and manipulate web analytics tools data on their drag and drop UI without having to add or delete any code on the page source. Furthermore, when you use a tag management tool, you will not need to deal with any development change. In other words, using a tag management tool allows you to make your own changes easily without having to deal with multiple web developers or having web developers changing over time, resulting in more reporting and communication tasks to worry about.
Do not await the data from IT every monday
Whether monthly or weekly, every marketing team needs to report their actions and results. While creating the reports that support the latter, you need data that show the results of your marketing campaigns. Asking for the data from IT every monday is wasted time!
What you need to do instead of asking for data covering your campaign performance from IT is having a data grabber tool. Sounds complex? Data grabber tools are used for pulling data from all marketing tools and databases. The most famous one is Supermetrics. With Supermetrics, you are able to pull all cost data from several sources like Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Criteo into a Google Sheet. After that, Supermetrics runs SQL query and pulls user acquisition and lifetime value data from your live database into the same sheet.
With integrating cost and user acquisition data, live dashboard for the results of marketing activities are created. The latter not only prevents you from asking for data from IT, but also allows you to prepare hourly marketing reports, rather than weekly or monthly, which can be called live dashboards.
Test fast, fail fast, learn fast
Last but not least, you need to be able to test everything easily. Increasing their company’s website’s conversion rate ratio is marketers’ main objective. However, lacking the ability to test on every point of customer journey will result in depriving you from a lot of potential. Moreover, you need to be able to implement your learnings from the earlier points of the journey on the later points. In summary, if you are only able to test anything on your ads but cannot touch landing pages, you are losing revenue. You need to support your ad results with landing page tests and learnings.
To achieve the latter, your new friends will be A/B testing tools, such as Google Optimize and Optimizely. One opinion suggests that optimizing a website is the product managers’ job; however, marketers definitely possess more customer and marketing insights than PMs. You are the one attracting users and ensuring they end up landing on your website; in fact, insights you gain from ads can be applied to landing pages too. Accessing these tools will allow you to test and optimize just ad landing pages, which are your playground. After that, you will be able to start testing on the whole website.
To sum up, marketers’ days involve a lot of technical work and tasks. I do not aim to recommend you doing all the technical tasks on your own; however, decreasing IT dependency within key activities like data pulling, campaign result analysis or web analytics implementation makes you more agile. At the end of the day, being agile in our fast paced world is one of the key skills toward success.
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