Marketing Mag’s featured article of the day last Wednesday made us smile because it essentially repeats what we’ve been saying for the last year: marketers aren’t even getting close to as much value from their data as they could be.  Why is that? They don’t know how.

Deloitte Canada presented the study at last week’s Advertising and Marketing Week conference, which “showed that 82% of more than 300 surveyed CMOs have been asked to interpret consumer analytics data and admitted that they felt unqualified to do so based on previous experience.”

“Marketers [overwhelmingly] believe (71 per cent) that harnessing data analytics is one of the most important challenges they face. Two-thirds (66 per cent) of marketers use analytics in making key decisions related to marketing. However, half of respondents (51 per cent) do not have the in-house skills to harness data and 44 per cent also do not rely on agencies for support with data analytics.”

“This is an exciting time for the marketing industry. With the role of the marketer evolving it is necessary for the marketer-agency relationship to progress as well,” said Colleen Albiston, Chief Marketing Officer, Deloitte. “From our research there are clear gaps that marketers cannot fill in-house, and they will look to agencies for this support. Agencies have an important opportunity here that they shouldn’t pass up.”

Digital marketing is challenging most CMOs because their job is to take the information they’re given and plan their strategies around it. But the volume and diversity of data that is now available from marketing campaigns is pushing the limits of their data analysis skills. This is part of what’s been driving the trend we’ve been observing for years of marketing being a fundamental driver of investment in IT and related tech services.

It’s not entirely their fault. In the past, CMOs have not generally been hired for their data modelling abilities – other skills have been prioritized. Developing algorithms to break down oodles of data into easily-understood insights, or even overseeing the creation of such algorithms, simply falls outside of the skillsets of most CMOs. Marketing abilities have mainly been evaluated by perceived performance in past roles, which has always been difficult to quantify objectively with traditional marketing methods such as radio, print and television.

We’re the type of geeks that are needed to build such models. The geekiest kind, in fact.

The Qoints Digital Marketing Intelligence (DMI) tool puts marketers in full control of their data by removing the daunting task of interpreting it. Companies send us their data, and we send it back to them in a useable format which includes an industry benchmark so they can see how their efforts compare to their competitors’.

That benchmark is the real game changer, because a major part of the problem that CMOs face is the difficulty of contextualizing the results of their digital marketing efforts across the board. Today, when a CMO is asked by stakeholders to provide some reasoning behind a reported 2% bump in sales, delivering a quantifiable response is essentially impossible without impeccable data management from before the start of the time period being examined. With Qoints DMI, answering such a question with confidence becomes much easier, and it’s backed up with the industry’s first-ever neutral repository of digital promotion data to quantify any claims made.

Like we said up top, this is nothing new to us which is why we’re smiling. But not as brightly as our current clients. Drop us a line and we’ll tell you who they are. You’ve heard of them.