How to prepare and scale marketing operations before you implement Datorama

If you are a marketing operations lead or a CMO wondering how to scale up your marketing for different channels, product lines in Manufacturing, one of the challenges is each marketing team has its own lingo on customer, segmentation, assets, and campaign process. If you have 100’s of products with multiple level categories and customer segments, the process becomes more complex to start a new campaign, report on the performance of marketing, and scale your operations. So the question is how do you set a foundation right for your marketing teams before you think of a CDP? My blog post will address this.

Standardize your Customer Segments

If you are part of marketing operations that deal with different teams in marketing, there is a wide array of assets that need to be tracked. This could become an unwieldy process if there is no standardization built on it. To give a few examples, here is a rough list to start with.

  1. Campaigns
  2. Business Units
  3. Product names
  4. Segments or Markets
  5. KPI to track like actions, views, downloads, etc.

So the challenge for marketing teams is that each marketing team calls segments different when it comes to industries. An industry can be Healthcare in general but can go down to hospitals or pharma or you can go any level down. There is a good amount of Industry standardization like NAICS or SIC which can help but they are all industry standards that can overwhelm marketing teams. So the best strategy for Markets or segments is to do the following.

  1. Agree on common high-level markets segments across. These could be industries like Auto, Aerospace, Mining, etc on a very high level
  2. Marketing teams want to market to the personas or the sub-segment of your high-level market. Provide flexibility for the marketing teams to call their segment whatever they want but subcategorize them to your highest market segment.
  3. Create a Market segment, child segment data dictionary and have it standardized to the NAICS or SIC code for cross lookups.

Standardize Metadata for Marketing assets with the common naming convention.

Once the customer segment is defined, agree on a naming convention for assets. Now when it comes to assets, there can be confusion on what is the marketing asset which needs to be tagged or categorized? Here are some examples of assets.

  1. Brochures.
  2. Websites, landing pages, microsites, etc
  3. Marketing material like pdf, white papers, toolkits, etc
  4. Campaigns on channels like youtube videos, Facebook posts, etc.

So the question is what would be the naming convention to be followed on marketing assets?

  1. For campaigns, it can be as simple as (Product category)-(market segment)-(custom campaign title). E.g AutoParts-Automotive-Spring campaign as an example.
  2. For assets that need to be tracked, it has to have an action which you want the user to do followed by customer segment which it is targetted for, product category it is associated with, and finally a meaningful name. E.g View-AutoParts-Auto-Whitepaper.pdf as an example.
  3. For your websites, microsites, etc depending upon the purpose of them, it can start with a business unit or product category followed by the customer market segment which you are targetting and a name for the site. E.g Radiator-Auto-Maintainance
  4. For google analytics lovers, you can use ad tags to create the standard names for the assets internally so that reporting on google analytics is aligned with your standard tags. The google ad tags should be tracked in your CDP like Datorama so that reports are generated easily.
  5. If you leverage marketing automation forms like pardot, marketing cloud, etc, have the form names use the standard naming convention like a Business unit customer segment name, followed by product category and key action which you want the customer to do. E.g Auto-Glass-Inquiry form.
  6. If you are working with third-party ad agencies, vendors for your campaign, Ensure that the vendors tag the names of the assets with your standardized naming conventions.

Set an onboarding process for your marketing teams for new launches Periodic reviews.

Once you have a strategy for standardizing your assets, customer segments, it is time to execute your strategy. This would start with a simple onboarding process for your different marketing teams where you help them with the naming convention of the assets, help them with tracking their marketing campaigns, etc. Here is a simple process where you can start with your marketing team.

  1. Create an asset collection form or campaign details form for the marketing team and have them fill it. For the asset collection form, it can be a list of all assets they have at the moment.
  2. If the marketing team is trying to launch a new campaign, have the form collect the purpose of the campaign, key metrics to measure for the campaign, channels, customer segments targeted, products leveraged for the campaign, etc.
  3. Once the data collection form is created and the marketing team has filled in all the information, it is time to have review meetings with the marketing team and work on the standardization of the assets and campaigns.
  4. Now keep in mind that your role is not to overwhelm the marketing team which is already short-staffed with your new jargon but helps to cross-pollinate their assets with the standard.
  5. Have a meeting with the leadership team and make sure you get the buy-in from them to agree on key results on how you would measure the success of your marketing campaign.
  6. In order to sell the value of the onboarding process to marketing leadership, position it as automation which will reduce a significant amount of time to report results to their high-level leadership. e.g imagine tracking multi-channel tracking results done on multiple assets like microsites, pdfs, etc on different devices.
  7. The key to the process is empathy where you really work with the different marketing teams and let them know the value of standardization and how it would help them champion future funding initiatives with the leadership teams.

Set reporting right.

Once the assets are standardized and the onboarding process is completed, it is time to have a strategy on reports to track the success of marketing events/campaigns for each of the marketing teams. Now, this is where CDP tools like Datorama come in. Since all the data is already tracked and captured in Daraoma, it is time to slice and dice the data to have each business unit track its results seamlessly. The below screenshot is an example of a reporting dashboard your team can get immediately once your standardization is in place.

As always feel free to post your comments below or email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions.

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Kevin Spohn

Author: Kevin Spohn

Kevin has been with Cummins for 3+ years managing a team of digital analytics specialists. His team is focused on new tools and technology to enable Cummins’ global network of marketers to optimize their digital initiatives through innovation and smart automation. In the past three years, he has worked to deploy multichannel, competitor, and consumer insight reporting tools that allow our marketers to optimize their campaigns and increase ROI. When he is not pursuing career goals, he is busy with renovations for his super-old home (1952) or traveling to various national parks throughout the US.

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