As a CMO or marketing professional, planning your route to value is arguably the foundation that needs to be laid before implementing any marketing strategy or campaign. Just like the foundation of a building keeps the structure sound, making it the most important element of any construction project, we think that having a concise and accurate plan as to how you’re going to achieve success with advanced marketing analytics is crucial when mapping out your route to value.
Of course, when planning to build a structurally sound foundation, there are many avenues that need to be explored given all the variable factors that can affect it’s strength. Some may be quantifiable, while others are more volatile which is why there’s never one single correct route to take.
Imagine being able to forecast what the future may throw at your strong foundation and being able to map out a better plan for what comes after the foundation is laid? With some advanced marketing analytics tools and tactics, you’re able to do exactly that!
But How?
With some marketing analytics tools, that have predictive capabilities, you’re able to perform small and simple experiments by inputting your data to see what happens when testing and exploring different scenarios. These scenarios could include things like changes in your marketing budget.
So how exactly do you do those experiments to be able to see different routes to value or outcomes you can take?
- Answer Your Biggest Questions
If you haven’t already defined your biggest questions, you clearly won’t be able to answer them. First, we’d recommend you read our post to find out how to define your business questions with an 
. Now you can start to get answers to your specific business questions, for example, “How are our social media campaigns impacting revenue?”
With marketing analytics tools like Proof BusinessGPS™ you’re able to review the highest yielding marketing tactics and gain key insights specific to a selected marketing analytics model all based on Regression Analytics.
- Turn Insight Into Action
Once you have the answers to the challenges that your business is facing, you’ll be able to summarize and compare investment insights, giving you an overview of costs and benefits at one glance. With an intelligent marketing analytics tool you should be presented with alternate scenarios that enable you to create “what-if” scenarios to optimize ROI on your marketing program.
- Explore Time Lag
You’ll want to get to know how strongly your tactics and activities are correlating in a 1:1 correlation analysis and examine the time to impact effect. Marketing analytics tools help you understand how your marketing activities are correlated. They enable you to calculate and visualize the strength of data pair relationships and examine time to impact between data points.
- Optimize Marketing ROI
With the different scenarios presented and tested, you will be able to see the different future outcomes of those cases (or possible multiplier effects). By having the foresight options presented to you ahead of time, you’re able to evaluate the different options and choose what route to value to opt in for, ultimately allowing you to optimize marketing ROI.
1. What does Route to Value Mean in Marketing?
Showing the results of a marketing campaign in relation to the budget spent on that campaign is a vital element of any marketing manager’s job. Proven results mean that the money spent on a particular campaign was worth the outlay, allowing CMO’s to exhibit the ROI.
However, given the information we now have at our fingertips, CEO’s no longer want their marketing teams to gamble with hindsight analytics, by only seeing results at the end of a potentially unsuccessful marketing campaign. Thankfully, with new analytics technologies becoming available, marketing professionals can plan the route to value of a marketing project before executing it.
Marketing route value is the process of analysing factors that could affect a marketing campaign before carrying through with it. It allows marketers to visualise the most efficient avenues to apply their campaign with tools that help to identify, understand, and navigate the most impactful opportunities. These routes consider a multitude of factors. including marketing mix modelling projects, online and offline marketing investments, sales dynamics, competitor actions and consumer engagement.
2. Challenges that Marketing Professionals Face when Planning Route to Value
Without the right tools, planning a route to value can feel like an enormous task to undertake because there might be multiple things that can bring value to the table for your marketing strategy. Some marketing analytics tools enable you to explore different routes to value by presenting you with a variety of scenarios, you’re able to choose one and take it to the planning and execution phase.
Some of the challenges that marketers face when setting out their routes include:
- A lack of business questions to understand the answers to
- An inadequate understanding of the marketing problem that requires a solution in order to turn insight into action
- Difficulty comparing the impact of marketing investments on profit margins
- Mix modelling marketing projects can be irregular making it difficult to accurately learn from and test results
- MMM is also extremely expensive. To run classic MMM costs a lot and needs many data scientist resources to be effective
- Hiring a qualified data science agency to get accurate results comes with a massive price tag, that’s out of the question for many businesses
- Calculating and visualizing the strength of data relationships
- Examining time to impact between data points
- Optimizing total marketing ROI
3. How do Advanced Marketing Analytics Tools Work?
Intelligent route planning software integrates data dynamically and automatically plans the route to value for you. It uses data points to create a route that considers a wide range of factors including sales goals, customer data and competitor results.
In situations when patterns aren’t easily recognizable anymore, like in the instance of the pandemic where the only constant is turbulence and change, marketing analytics tools allow you to visualise a route to value more clearly by opening your eyes, coaching your thinking, and fortifying your decisions.
Marketing analytics tools can reveal important relationships that you may not have been able to see at first glance, giving new understanding and new inspiration. They also help those outside of the marketing realm to understand and appreciate the impact and value you’ve created.
4. How do I Create & Optimize my Route?
With advanced marketing analytics tools, like Proof BusinessGPS™ you can map out your route to value ahead of time. You’re able to create and optimize your route through the ability to measure online and offline marketing investments with comparable ROI metrics.
These intelligent tools provide practical and actionable recommendations on how marketing effectiveness can be improved while giving you the ability to learn about the factors influencing the data from successful or unsuccessful campaigns. With this information, marketers are empowered with insights to strategise new successful campaigns.
Being able to actually optimize the route to value of your marketing strategies requires access to predictive analytics technologies, a feature that is built into advanced marketing analytics software. With these features, you’re able to create projections of the future allowing you to make intelligent decisions in different scenarios for the best impact.
Knowing what data to feed into the analytics software will impact the accuracy of your projections but when it comes to the optimization of actually planning your route leave it to the software and say goodbye to complex spreadsheets and manual effort.
With new intelligent technology now at our fingertips, CMO’s have the means to lay a strong foundation for their future marketing campaigns by plan their route to value ahead of time. Thanks to predictions and projections into the future, marketers can get a handle on their ROI before even embarking on a new campaign.
Planning your route to value has never been easier and you don’t even need to recruit data scientist to help you map it out.
Just like the GPS on your smart phone, Proof BusinessGPS™ is a powerful marketing analytics platform that’s fast, accurate, and easy to use. Big companies like Salesforce, United Healthcare, Samsung, Sato, Deloitte, and Johnson Controls swear by it. Smaller companies like W2O, Desenio, and Allison + Partners do to.
with us today if you’d like to find out more about how we can help you map out your route to value and prove results.