• Only 32 percent of marketing organizations in financial services can access a BI tool
  • Conducting an inventory of data existing across the platform yields new insights
  • Aligning and prioritizing measurement goals with sales helps to focus efforts and limit requirements

The SiriusDecisions 2016 CMO Study indicates some interesting trends regarding financial services investments in marketing technology. Perhaps the most interesting insight from the survey is that only 32 percent of financial services respondents have access to a business intelligence (BI) tool, while 46 percent of organizations from other industries have invested in one.

While this may be a surprise for some, gathering business intelligence is a common pain point for financial services marketing leaders. In fact, one of the most common questions we get from financial services clients is, “How can I get more business insights from my current technology without recommending additional investment?”

In most cases, the information is available for marketing to gather insights, but it gets lost between different platforms with specific purposes and is very difficult to consolidate into insightful reporting dashboards.

So how do you go about gathering insightful information from a disjointed technology stack when there is little appetite for investment in an additional BI tool? While the task will always be time-consuming without investing in technology that enables the process, there are three steps to make sure you are capturing the most information from your current platforms:

  • Information inventory. Conduct an audit of the relevant information that you can gather from the various platforms you employ. Each platform (e.g. social media intelligence, sales force automation, marketing automation, Web content management, channel marketing management) will provide a different view of the customer and marketing’s performance. It is important to assess what information you currently gather from each platform, as well as compile a list of data points each platform is capable of providing.
  • Consolidate and map data sources. Once the full inventory is complete, consolidate the list to include only data points that provide useful insights to your organization and those that there is a good degree of confidence in the accuracy. Additionally, you need to map the data points to their source platform.
  • Align to measurement goals. Work with your functional counterparts in sales and product to define and prioritize the insights they would like marketing to gather. Without a BI platform in place, it can be very time consuming to gather and present useful information. Therefore, it is important to work with your functional partners to rationalize the data gathering requirements.

With this process to identify and gather insights, the key to utilizing them is to organize the measurement process and structure to connect actions taken across the organization with business outcomes.