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Bonus Episode 2

Using Marketing Data to Impact Your Campaigns

Illustration of Mark Shannon, Senior Manager of Client Services at StackAdapt

About This Episode

June 15, 2022

We dive into a discussion on marketing data, how to decipher it, and how to leverage data to drive campaign success.

Alex Billington | ARB – Community Growth Manager, Funnel

Mark Shannon | Senior Manager, Client Services, StackAdapt

00:00

Transcript

Episode Introduction (00:00:00)

I think segmentation is incredibly important. It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. And you know, with that in mind, I recommend to everyone on my team and all the clients that I work with, you know, to segment the data at the very start at the outset, to ensure that it can be broken out later. Because you can always break out well, segmented data, but you can’t really create segments where none exist.

How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:21)

But then you think about the social landscape. Research Data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touchpoints, that longtime loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales gotten to a point where it can drive better results of audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart if you’re tuning in. You’re tuning in, you’re tuning in to How Agencies Thrive podcast.

Matt (00:00:45)

Hi, everyone. My name is Matt, I’m the Education and Development Manager at StackAdapt. And welcome to this bonus episode of The How Agencies Thrive Podcast. Today, the topic of choice is marketing data, and mainly how to decipher and leverage powerful information on your campaigns to help you drive success. In this episode, I have Alex Billington from funnel and Mark Shannon from StackAdapt, to share their expertise on the topic. As always, this bonus episode will be made up of short, rapid fire questions. But to kick things off, I’ll pass the torch to our guests to tell us a little bit about themselves and their experience in the industry. So let’s start with you, Alex.

Alex (00:01:22)

Yeah, so a little bit about me, I’m the community growth manager here at funnel, we’re based in Stockholm, and also office in Boston as well. And we’re a marketing data hub that allows that allows marketers to collect all their data from various different platforms, transform it to get it ready for analysis, and then send it to wherever they need to whether that’s a data visualization tool or or data warehouse. And so yeah, I’m happy to be here. And I hope we’re gonna have a good conversation.

Matt (00:01:51)

Absolutely. Thanks so much, Alex. Now, over to you Mark, a little bit about yourself.

Mark (00:01:55)

Yeah, thanks, Matt. So my name is Mark Shannon, I am a senior manager of Client Services here at StackAdapt. I’ve been on the StackAdapt team for about four years. So I’ve seen a monumental amount of growth, especially a lot of growth over the last couple of years, I work very closely with a team of account managers, really, my mandate is to help empower our team to provide world class support service, and to launch some pretty awesome campaigns.

Matt (00:02:21)

Thanks so much. So as mentioned, a couple rapid-fire questions for everybody. But to start out, just for our listeners who might be unfamiliar with the concept, starting with you, Alex, then we’ll go over to you Mark. Let’s sefine marketing data. So how would each of you define this term marketing data?

Alex (00:02:44)

Yeah, I would say marketing data is what I will call kind of aggregated information that either could be useful to inform your marketing efforts, but also information that’s being created as a result of your marketing efforts. I have a thing where I sort of say there’s data being created at all times all around you. And it’s kind of up to you whether you use it or not. So, I think, in a short definition, that’s how I describe marketing data.

Matt (00:03:12)

Awesome. How about you, Mark?

Mark (00:03:15)

Yeah, I think to you know, to expand on that a little bit informs really what we know about our target audience are potential users. And this comes through market research by analyzing trends and personas, it can come as the result of previous campaigns or similar market executions. And ultimately, you know, when we’re launching campaigns, and you know, trying to find out exactly who to target and what to do for these executions, it’s really useful to identify not only who to target, but what to target, when to target, what messages resonate, and so on and so forth.

Matt (00:03:46)

Fantastic. So further to that, I think what we could help our listeners understand are some of the benefits. So, what are the largest benefits that both of you have seen from leveraging marketing data? And further to that, how can this benefit agencies and help make them more competitive?

Alex (00:04:06)

So I mean, just to sort of give a little bit of background like, for me, modern marketing now is all about hypothesizing it’s about testing and analyzing and learning to basically try and understand like, what is driving what what causes this performance to go, Well, what works and doesn’t? And how can we improve on what we’re doing? How can we, how can we iterate. And then if you if you look at sort of marketing data, being the crux of that marketing data is the thing that facilitates you being able to do all of that. And for me, the benefits, I mean, all of our customers that are using, that are really leveraging their marketing data. They’re the ones who are striving ahead. The companies that were in early, are doing super well with that data, but in terms of like, how agencies can get sort of be more competitive. I think the big one for me is empowering account managers to be able to work with their data. I think some agencies have these sort of what I would call like inflated data teams, and the account managers have this kind of request process and they request hey, I need this. And the clients asked for this, can you do it? Can you can you get me this data? Can you slice it this way? Can you pipe it here. But there are tools out there like ours and orders that actually can allow and empower account managers to work with that data? Because I think at the end of the day, and from my time agency side, clients always want their agencies to do more, I don’t know what you think more, but they always want more analysis, they want more testing, more results, like they’re never satisfied with like, oh, yeah, we’re just waiting for the algorithm to figure things out. They want more. And in fact, they even want answers to questions they sort of didn’t really know that they had. So I think I would say that clients want that productivity, they don’t want to constantly ask for things they want to feel taken care of. And I think, account managers who are empowered with their data, they can go away, and they can perform independent analysis. And they can sort of report it back to the client, and have this much faster feedback loop with the with the client, it’s sort of less waiting for things, less apologies to the client, so sorry for the delay and more like, Hey, I’ve just pulled this really cool analysis for you. You know, what do you think of this? Or have you seen this before, or, Hey, this is what we think is happening with this, this is where we’d like to shift budget, etc. I think it’s sort of Yeah, empowering account managers to be modern marketers and work, you know, with their data with the with the client’s data with marketing data, that’s when account managers can kind of go above and beyond and get their own ideas and kind of yet proactively suggesting that to clients, I think that’s when you see clients being super happy.

Mark (00:06:43)

Alex, I couldn’t agree more. And I probably couldn’t have said it better myself, but I’m going to try, or at least to try, to give my version there. But absolutely, you know, empowering our account managers, giving them more actionable insights, and you know, things that they can actually do with the data. It ultimately, you know, if you think about it, time and money are kind of the lifeblood of any business. And, you know, being able to analyze and understand the marketing data from your campaigns ultimately saves time and money. It provides you with that ability to skip or contract those initial initial learning stages of a campaign before, you know, the measurable performance is really attained. But even then, once you do have that measurable performance, it gives you a lot of intelligence, you know, that you can then provide to your end user, right? So a lot of the time, you know, for our agencies, they end users are either those those clients, or, you know, if you’re a brand direct, they could even be the stakeholders within the organization. If you can more effectively communicate the impact of your marketing or advertising efforts, it helps you to really secure those those future investments with which much with much higher confidence, really also, you know, all throughout, it ensures that you’re targeting the right product to the right person at the right time. And honestly, I’d be remiss to say, you know, this is also super helpful mid campaign as well. You know, one of the great things that you mentioned, Alex is, a lot of our clients, they want us to be able to act fast and provide those those really useful snippets of information and insights, even in the middle of a campaign. So, you know, analyzing this data mid-campaign as well allows you to make those on-the-fly optimizations, whether you know, you have a message that isn’t resonating, or an audience that may not be right for who we’re trying to reach just really gives us a lot of power there.

Matt (00:08:32)

Fantastic. Thanks. Thanks to both of you. They’re now moving on to our next question that we wanted to answer for our listeners is, you know, on the topic of best practices, so what are some best practices that either of you would recommend when it comes to not only, you know, collecting this data, but deciphering this data and making these powerful decisions to impact your campaigns?

Mark (00:08:58)

Well, Alex, I’m gonna start with something and say, you know, I don’t know if you would agree, but I think segmentation is incredibly important. I always say, you know, it’s better to have it not need it than to need it not have it. And, you know, with that in mind, I recommend, you know, to everyone on my team and all the clients that I work with, you know, to segment the data at the very start at the outset, to ensure that it can be broken out later because you can always break out, well, segmented data, but you can’t really create segments where they don’t exist. Have you experienced that yourself?

Alex (00:09:29)

Yeah, if you’re referring to sort of UTM best practices and different types of segmentation, I think that getting that data, planning to use that data, even if you’re not going to use it is super important. Don’t assume you don’t need it, like, plan to use it. And then, if you don’t end up using the segmentation, you don’t end up using the granularity that you’ve created. That’s definitely fine. But plan to use it for sure.

Mark (00:09:55)

Absolutely. You know, in the StackAdapt platform, one of the things that I recommend to all of our users is that, you know, we break out campaigns by audiences or tactics, so that you have a lot more control when it comes to reporting and analysis, you know, to make those quick decisions and on the fly choices based on how you analyze that marketing data. And it really, you know, gives yourself an opportunity to understand that data from the outset. And rather than trying to make sense of how it can be broken out, and then having to guess afterwards, based on what you think you suddenly was set up as.

Alex (00:10:33)

Yeah, for sure. And I think like, just a quick note on data collection, I’m not going to get too technical here, because obviously, it’s a little bit of our bread and butter, as well. But I think the big thing for me is, once you start collecting, you need to make sure you get it all in the same place. Different words, you use centralization, consolidation, collection, whatever, but you need to get it in the same place, so that you can actually start making sense of it. So you can start transforming it, preparing it, cleaning it, mashing it—all of those buzzwords are kind of related to getting that data to a point where it’s actually useful. And not just 1000s of rows of data, because any marketer will be a bit intimidated by just 1000s and 1000s of rows of data. So yeah, getting into a platform where you can, where you can really do it and like for for agencies to kind of like just go back to that sort of point on how the agencies then create this modern marketer, how do they kind of facilitate account managers, I think, like, you’re trying to get agencies to kind of move away from these inflated data teams. So they’re not spending too much time on these big requests, kind of lists of requests, and then also training the marketers to become comfortable with that data. And then obviously, give them the technology they need to kind of explore it. But also, I think, shift the role of those data teams from like facilitators to strategists themselves, like give them that bigger remit to work on more value, add scalable data projects, instead of this, like, Hey, can I get this one thing? Yes, it’s gonna take me this amount of time and give you back, kind of get rid of that backlog and get them working on these big projects where they can go to, to the account team and say, Hey, we’ve just done this amazing, scalable analysis that’s going to be relevant for you, here’s a program to do it, here’s some code to do it, etc, etc. So, I think that’s important when it comes to best practice. Oh, and actually, one more I just thought of, I think it’s that I forgot to mention, it’s to kind of create group analysis time in account managers calendars where they can like, just spend time digging into data with no clear objective. This is just like time to explore data and dream up new hypothesis without really worrying too much about deliverables. I think, one of my colleagues referred to it as sort of exploring with data as a compass, sort of like no pressure, look through the data, see what you can kind of dig up. So yeah, those are my kind of best practices.

Mark (00:13:03)

That’s a really great tip, I think I’m happy to take that one back to my team and encourage them to do that. You know, but on the topic of training, where you mentioned, you know, I always say like, don’t be afraid to ask questions, there may be, you know, those on our team or on other books of business that, you know, have a good understanding of how to analyze certain sets of data, and really, to determine the meaningfulness of it. And I find that, you know, as account managers, sometimes we miss the forest for the trees, we’re so close to everything that, you know, we really do have to take that time to step back and look at the data that we’ve generated. And either, you know, try and find those analyses, you mentioned, Alex, you know, taking the time to really aimlessly kind of wander and see what you can find, or to leverage the expertise from those who have worked with that type of data before and really, you know, have a quick response there. Another thing, you know, one thing that you mentioned earlier about, you know, iterating, and I know, it’s an age-old mantra that our data science team uses, but test, iterate, repeat, it’s something that I try and encourage my own team to really look at, because that’s really the only way that you can take that scientific method and, you know, find better performance and find better subsets of data and different ways to do things.

Matt (00:14:18)

Awesome. So we’re just about at the end here, and for both of you, I always say with this last question, you know, feel free to get as speculative as you’d like to because what I’m interested to know, and what I’m sure listeners are interested to know is from both of you, what’s an emerging trend in the marketing data space that people should be looking out for in, you know, the coming year.

Mark (00:14:46)

For me, you know, okay, so I mean, I’m gonna go back to the whole thing that, you know, I know that I’m going to be served ads regardless of what I do and what regardless of what trends or you know, policies are happening out there. So, for me, I’d much rather those ads have some relevance to my interests. And, you know, despite efforts around limiting or neutralizing data collection, I think, you know, we’re gonna see this not going away anytime soon. And, in fact, it inspires, you know, kind of workarounds; it inspires ways to really still be able to collect and use that marketing data. So you know, if you look at the StackAdapt platform, you know, contextual advertising is a big thing. And it has been a big thing for a while. But, you know, things like page context, AI, lets us serve ads, when the content on the page is of the highest relevance to those users, regardless of whether or not we know anything about that user prior. And I find, I think that, you know, we’re gonna see a lot of trends of platforms and you know, different tools like this, really trying to find the best way to reach those audiences, without always having to rely on all those signals that we get at the very beginning. But kind of the ones that we generate throughout.

Alex (00:15:58)

Yeah, for sure. Definitely. I think I’ll try to, I’ll try and be quick, because I know we’re nearing the end. But for me, I’ll just, I’ll just to touch on, I think this this general switch from lead gen to demand gen. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s kind of seems like it’s the is the big thing that’s changing the kind of performance industry and or the growth marketing marketing industry in general. But this sort of switch to a kind of longer more sustainable look at things versus lead gen, where you’re paying to create something that turned into a sale or an email or meeting right away, it’s more about kind of creating value, and that that goes for like paid and organic, you know, it’s I think agencies will start becoming more kind of strategic partners to in house teams as well, and extensions of them so that they can work share insights, and kind of figure out like, Okay, what holes do we need to fill where, you know, which channels should we use to deliver more value in which stage of the funnel but not having to necessarily rely on not necessarily having to rely on you know, immediate lead gen and immediate results and trying to find this balance between kind of short term and kind of long term sustainable growth. And I think we’re seeing that with like, a big shift of brand awareness, and people starting to really try to track branded search as well. And, you know, there’s a lot of community building going on and etc, etc. And on gating content, too, I mean, people, you know, brands, companies, a lot of what we’re seeing in the B2B SaaS space is people want to give now give, give, give, give, give, and then and then build it that way. So yeah, I think that that general shift from lead gen to demand gen, and if you haven’t, kind of read a little bit about that and watch some for some videos that support cast, I think it’s well worth diving into.

Matt (00:17:48)

Well, Alex and Mark, thanks so much for joining us for this bonus episode. To our listeners, we hope that you took a lot away, and we look forward to sharing more helpful tips and tricks in future episodes of How Agencies Thrive podcast. Thanks again for listening.

Episode Outro (00:18:07)

Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback, or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can find us at stackadapt.com Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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