Give ‘Em a Break: Let Marketing Analysts Do Their “Real” Job

Despite the fact that the enterprise is looking to grow their analytics ranks, finding and retaining world-class analytical talent is becoming a very hard task. This means more work falls in the laps of companies’ existing analysts, making their life hectic and—sometimes—miserable.

This is a potentially deadly problem from organizations trying to compete in a digital-first, customer-centric age. Even though data and analytics are an important priority for them, most companies still struggle with transforming it into a competitive edge, according to a Data & Analytics Report by MIT Sloan Management Review and SAS.

“It’s not simply that the competitive environment is shifting as more organizations become data savvy,” the report states. “Instead, deriving business value from analytics depends in important ways on building strong internal capabilities that link insights with business outcomes. Half of the survey respondents (50%) cite turning analytical insights into business actions as one of their top analytics challenges. Difficulty managing the vast amounts of ever-increasing data from multiple sources is also an issue.”

Here’s the crux of the situation. Organizations can’t get that competitive edge because data scientists—especially for marketing analysts as a part of this group—aren’t getting the break they deserve to truly deliver game-changing insights.

Let me explain. Marketing analysts are hired to fulfill a position with several hats to wear. Many come on board to find signals in the data and build models, but, instead, find themselves with highly grinding, repetitive work that’s frankly not very interesting. Some elements of this uninteresting, non-productive work  may include:

• Getting access to the needed data, which can be a challenge in and of itself with silos across the company. This can mean more SQL work or getting stuck waiting for IT or data engineering to deliver the data, which can take from days to weeks or worse.
• Preparing the right customer attributes needed for reports or for segmentation of modeling, which requires significant effort
• Manually connecting insights to execution by generating and uploading files to different business systems, sometimes on a daily basis
• Managing an ever-growing number of SQL scripts, which makes everything more hectic and error-prone
• Waiting days or weeks for IT’s help on one or more of the above items

The good news is that this is changing, and the goal of a CDP marketing and a Marketing Automation Platform like ActionIQ is to let marketing analysts finally focus on more strategic work. By automating and eliminating 99 percent of the SQL required in order to carry out these daily marketing operations, these typical requests can become more “self-service.” Those seeking the information can get the ball rolling themselves. When it comes to the previously tedious tasks, all the marketing analysts will have to do is double-check to ensure everything is correct, as opposed to receiving an email ticket request and doing all of the manual work of writing code and more. Analysts still stay in the driver’s seat, but from a much more strategic (and fun!) standpoint.

Here is where the real shift happens, helping companies to drive the value of the data and find that competitive edge. When marketing analysts aren’t bogged down and can finally break through to do the job they are there—and want—to do.