6 Goals Data, Operations and Marketing Teams Can Actually Agree On
A recent study from Meltwater showed that 1 in 5 marketers dread having to collaborate with marketing operations teams, while 1 in 4 dread collaborating with marketing analytics teams.
With a completely different set of goals, expectations and priorities, it’s difficult for marketing, ops and data teams to get along. Your marketing team is focused on a few things: revenue and customer experience. You’re focused on maintaining your data architecture that gets the results marketers actually want.
We’re here to help you get back on track and find some common ground with your team.
By giving your team specific, shared goals, you can help bring a little more kumbaya to your day-to-day, while making your C-suite happy by demonstrating growth towards goals together, rather than running totally separate marathons and distracting each other from hitting those goals.
Below, we’ll break down 6 goals that data teams can work towards with your marketing team, with precise measurements and inspiration to get there.
6 Goals Each Team Can Actually Agree On
The right goals bring benefits to each team and function — not just one. And a well-selected goal will bring downstream benefits to the entire organization.
It’s also important to not just pick a goal, but to pick an agreed measurement for that goal. When you’re selecting goals for your team, make sure you align on the nitty gritty way you’re measuring it as well.
Below, we’ll take a look at a few goals that will get your team aligned, a few different variations on those goals and some inspiration along the way from brands like Dell, Liberty Latin America, Northwestern Mutual and HP on how they got their marketing and data teams happy together.
1. Increase Operational Efficiency
What this means for your team: One thing each member of your team loves — whether they’re a CIO or a marketing manager? Efficiency. We’ve all heard “Work smarter, not harder,” which is why focusing on measuring your team’s operational efficiency and working toward that goal will make everyone happy.
How to measure it: This can be measured in a few different ways, depending on what industry you’re in or what your operating model looks like. Inputs could be hours worked, team members involved, or in some cases capital and operational expenditure. Then you can measure that against revenue, reduction in hours worked, business growth and more.
Read the Dell case study here.
2. Decrease Audience Creation Time
What this means for your team: This is a way to measure operational efficiency. Marketers need to launch campaigns — fast. But it takes time for data engineers to pull data from everywhere it may need to come from and get it ready for marketers to go. By focusing on goals and solutions and identifying any friction points that help reduce the time it takes to go from Jira ticket to campaign launch, data teams can get their time back and marketers can innovate faster.
How to measure it: Start with the day that an audience request is created, and track the time in reduction after implementing process approvals. For a little inspiration, the analytics team at Liberty Latin America was able to deploy audiences in 75% less time by reimagining their stack to give both marketers and “SQL Guys” an easier workflow.
Read more about how Liberty Latin America empowered their marketing and commercial teams here.
3. Increase Speed to Market
What this means for your team: Marketers love to move fast. You love to have extra time to work on projects that are more interesting than the endless list pulls. That’s why speed to market is the perfect goal to focus on as a north star. Not only does this help speed up your efficiency, but it also ensures that the quality of your campaign is higher, with fresher, faster data.
How to measure it: Start with the time you establish an audience or campaign idea, then measure how long it takes for the campaign to hit the audience’s inbox. This is simply a matter of measuring the difference between the two standardized values.
Read more about how Northwestern Mutual increased speed to market here.
4. Decrease Spend
What this means for your team: Lately in the “do more with less” economy, companies across industries are faced with the imperative to do more with less. Understanding where you can optimize costs across your stack will mean that you can perhaps reallocate some of those funds towards projects that will benefit both you and your marketing team. Focusing on high-value stack projects (like going the composable path) will give everyone something to smile about.
How to measure it: Costs can be direct and indirect when you’re measuring how you cut spend. For example it could be a full-time team member dedicated to managing expensive pipelines and data integrations, or it could be the actual costs associated with moving and storing data copies within different systems.
Read more about how HP saved money with composable architecture.
5. Improve Data Quality
What this means for your team: Better quality data means better customer experiences. That’s not rocket science for marketers. But it’s deeper for technical teams. They’re also responsible to make sure that their data holds every rigorous security standard — no matter what the industry is. Working towards rigorous data quality and accuracy goals together will satisfy everyone, all the way up to your leadership team.
How to measure it: There are a few different ways to make sure that your data is following the right standards. This could include measuring the volume or frequency of how often or how many alerts you receive for any data related issues. This could also include how long you actually spend fixing data, or getting requests to fix data.
Read more about how Brightspeed used a composable CDP to save time and market better.
6. Increase Conversion Rate
Seeing is believing — and knowing that the data and the marketing are working together the way they should come through in conversion rates. While this is typically a goal in your marketer’s roster, it will help you understand how well your data performs
How to measure it: Track conversion rates before you make improvements and modifications to your audiences and campaigns. Then after implementing new solutions and augmenting your data strategy, see how well they perform against the control and calculate the percentage increase from your control to your enhanced audiences.
Read the Atlassian case study here to see how they boosted conversions by 71% with ActionIQ audiences.
Share Goals and Outcomes, then Share the Reward ♥️
By running in the same direction with your marketing and marketing operations teams, you can achieve bigger things, and make decisions that will lift your entire team up.
Remember, unity isn’t just a warm, fuzzy concept — it’s a productivity hack. So, let’s aim for fewer passive-aggressive emails and more collaborative brainstorming sessions. After all, nothing says team spirit like jointly celebrating a job well done (or at least collectively sighing in relief that it’s over).
Download The Technical Guide to Composable CDPs to discover the latest insights and strategies shaping the data landscape and learn how to work better together.