| MARKETING |
pragmatic marketing science by the 1960s. Marketing
remained largely in the “realm of art,” as he put it.
With the development of productivity analysis in the 80s,
the trek toward marketing analytics surged ahead. That was
followed by enterprise analysis systems in the early 2000s
that gave large companies the capability to track their
marketing efforts better. answer lies in technology. Powerful new decision-support
tools can help sort through vast numbers of alternatives
and pick the best. When combined with the experience,
insight, and analytical skills of a good management team,
the tools offer a way to make consistent sound and
rational choices even in the face of baffling complexity – a
capability that our guts can never match.
Business intelligence followed, coming together as a
coherent discipline in the mid-to-late 2000s. It all paved
the way for modern data analytics, powered by the
bleeding-edge cloud technology, predictive modeling, and
information for APIs. IT’S A REVOLUTION
Today, we are witnessing a shift in data analytics tools,
which continue to become increasingly available to
marketers from every type and size of business. Prices are
dropping, cloud solutions are enabling mobility, drag-and-
drop interfaces are replacing code-based ones, automation
and AI are handling the heavy lifting, and integrations are
bringing silos down.
It’s easy to forget that until this now, effective data
analysis was primarily the realm of larger corporations
that could afford the (necessary) infrastructure to work
with huge sets of unstructured data from various sources.
That infrastructure usually included data warehouses, an
accompaniment of data analysts, and expensive software to
make sense of the data and deliver the results of the data
analysis to decision-makers.
That brings us back to the challenge facing today’s
executives: How do you analyze more in less time? The
Since the shift toward content-based marketing built
momentum, marketers find themselves under increasing
pressure to measure the effectiveness of their publishing
efforts. At the same time, they now have more data
available then was ever available in the past.
The number of data sources actively analyzed by
businesses is expected to grow by 83 percent between
2015 and 2020, according to the 2015 Salesforce State
of Analytics Report. By comparison, the number of data
sources only increased by 20 percent between 2010 and
2015.
The big question is not whether marketers can apply the
scientific method to available data. The question is now
how best to do it? The Salesforce report pointed out,
“business leaders face a continued influx of data and still
struggle to make sense of it all.”
TREND WATCH
These trends are being driven mainly by a wealth of
available data and emerging tools to make practical use
of that data. The urgency will only intensify as we shift into
2020. According to Marketing Land, the data analytics
landscape is primed to undergo even more significant
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