1. Marketing roles
Now that we have some understanding of marketing levers, let us switch gears to talk about marketing partners themselves.
2. Marketing analytics hub
Marketing Analysts work closely with internal as well as external partners. Internal partners are those within the Analyst's company (like members of the Marketing team), and external partners are outside of the company (like advertising account managers). A large part of a Marketing Analyst's job is to balance analytics needs across partners.
Within their own company, Analysts need to understand internal partner goals for marketing.
External partners, especially advertisers, rely on Marketing Analysts to assist with exchanging data to enable optimization and reporting toward internal goals. Analysts may sometimes have competing priorities across partners and must determine where the needs are most urgent.
All partners expect Marketing Analysts to be subject matter experts on marketing measurement.
3. Internal partners
When working with internal partners, we might assume that marketing teams will be the partners we interact with most frequently. However, this is not always the case!
Many teams are interested in marketing performance but not at the same level of detail as the marketing team.
Product teams hope that campaigns will increase customer acquisition by promoting new features.
Operations and finance teams want to stay abreast of marketing budgets.
Support and engineering want to understand which audiences marketing is acquiring!
4. Role-based marketing goals
As expected, different internal partners have varying marketing goals based on seniority.
Within marketing, Social Media Managers and Paid Search Analysts focus on brand engagement and demand for those specific channels and tactics.
While a Director of Marketing will focus on spend across all campaigns and channels.
A Chief Operating Officer looks at the efficiency of the marketing program compared to other investments.
Product Managers think about acquisition and retention, but specifically about the performance of campaigns related to new product features. Marketing Analysts are expected to navigate the goals of different teams in building scalable reporting and analysis.
5. Advertising partners
We reviewed how internal stakeholders will partner with a Marketing Analyst; now, we will talk about external advertising partners.
Advertisers work very closely with Marketing Analysts for several reasons.
Advertisers are dependent on the brands who use them to share data around purchase behavior or other customer outcomes. Without this, advertiser data will be incomplete and unable to recommend ways to optimize campaigns.
Marketing Analysts commonly use advertiser reports to dig into very granular data for that specific advertiser.
External partners always want to know what attribution model we are using (that is, how much purchase credit we assigned to each marketing lever) because it impacts our likelihood to spend more with them!
6. Let's practice!
Interpreting stakeholder and external partner questions is a key skill for Marketing Analysts to master! Time to practice via interview scenarios!