Marketing Metrics That Count

The world of finance and the world of marketing are not really all that different. Both are essential business units and have a direct impact on the profitability of any company. They even use the same tools for analysis and communication- Excel and PowerPoint respectively. Analysis of the data in Excel to draw conclusions, which are then presented to stakeholders in a Powerpoint deck designed to inform, illustrate, and update the relevant stakeholders on business affairs. But there are many similarities above and beyond the tools we use.

Let’s move forward and identify some of the similarities that exist.  

Analyzing ROI

With data acquisition a significant priority for businesses today, data-centric insights have become essential. The data better informs us on the user journey, what are the pain points the user is experiencing and what is being researched to solve those needs. This gives us a much better understanding of the buyer decisions and what influenced those decisions, helping us to craft content to nurture the user through the decision-making process. Real-time marketing applications like Harvest provide these insights, which is exactly what leadership teams are after.  

Due to these new advancements in technology, marketers are able to demonstrate the impact of their campaigns, presenting similar facts and figures a financial analyst would. Some metrics include Revenue, ROI, margin ratios (for marketers it's the ratio between the cost of customer acquisition and sale price), and turnover ratios (for marketers its gross marketing value).
 

Analyzing behavior

Both financial functions and marketing are tasked with driving top-line growth by leveraging customer relationship management tools to build a better client experience. New technologies have been instrumental for marketers in understanding client behavior. Social listening, predictive analytics, and omnichannel applications have all contributed to the endeavor of building out a holistic experience for the clients. These tools don’t just allow marketers to monitor but also respond in real time, crafting what we call brand nurturing.   

These new advancements in real-time customer feedback and new technologies have proliferated as a result share similarities with how a trader might go about his daily duties. Using monitoring tools to understand what’s happening within the markets and trying to understand on the aggregate how macroeconomic factors might impact the behavioral wisdom of investor decisions, share a marked similarity with a marketer monitoring their customer feedback tools. Both for the trader and the marketer, that feedback will be used to make better-informed decisions designed to directly influence the customer’s buying decisions.

The marketing analytics and the finance world aren’t so different after all! Although we use different names to describe them, it’s always a set of numbers and ratios that matter.

- Ahmed Rosowsky & Rohit Nayak