Gearing up for growth

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.

There’s the saying doing the rounds at the moment “why waste a good recession?, meaning that times like these provide an opportunity for organisations to become leaner and trim off some of the fat in the business. Whilst it’s not necessarily a very pleasant experience, the trading conditions that we are experiencing at the moment helps organisations focus on being both effective and efficient. Data and analytics have been helping organisations to optimise their processes and improve their returns. My sense though, is that the focus of analytics over the past year or so has become increasingly tactical and operational, now with murmuring in some quarters about green shoots of recovery it’s time to start thinking about how analytics is going to help companies gear back up for growth.

Some of the disciplines that have become necessary during these tough economic conditions need to be maintained as markets begin to pick up. Tight and robust measurement of marketing performance, strict accountability being required on marketing investments are all activities that organisations have been forced to adopt to ride out the storm. As conditions ease these disciplines need to retained and embedded into the business processes. They should become the hygiene factors of marketing management in the post-recessionary environment.

In my last column I talked about the use of maturity models and looked at the WebTrends maturity model in some detail. As I said it’s a useful contribution to the debate and can potentially provide a framework for comparison and benchmarking. I think greater value comes from taking a maturity model approach, customising it to the organisation and using it to create a roadmap for the development of the measurement and analytics capabilities into the future. Or perhaps in more simplistic terms; defining where the organisation is now, where it wants to be in the future and how it’s going to get there.

The approach is to take a look at the current competencies of the organisation on a number of different dimensions. The WebTrends DM3 model has some suggestions but there may be others which are more relevant or appropriate depending on the type of business or the industry sector. It should include attributes such as the breadth or data sources and tools, the analytical processes, the level of data integration and the level of business adoption as a minimum. A simple model would then capture where the organisation is currently on each of those dimensions and then where it wants to be in the future, say in a year to 18 months time. The next stage is then to use the model to develop a roadmap. The roadmap outlines how the organisation is going to move up the maturity curve and becomes in effect the measurement strategy for the next year or so. This provides the framework and context for all the decisions around data, systems, processes and people and so helps to provide the answers to questions like; “How many analysts do I need and what skills should they have?”, “What technologies do I need to invest in and when?”, “Which data should I be starting to integrate?”.

Whilst it may not look like it, the timing is right for this kind of more strategic approach. We’re not going to be in a recession for ever (though it may feel like it) and when the upturn comes companies need to be poised for growth. New marketing strategies will be created, new tactics will be implemented and new measurement approaches will be needed to measure the effectiveness of those strategies. So now is a good time for organisations to map out how measurement and analytics is going to support their recovery and keep it sustained.