Marketing business questions

1. Marketing business questions

Up to this point, we have covered marketing levers and partner roles; now, let us bring it all together to review some common business questions a Marketing Analyst would encounter.

2. Common questions: revenue impact

Marketing data questions fall into a few themes. One theme is revenue impact, with questions like "Did our campaign influence revenue?" Ideally, people want the ability to compare tactics and channels by cost-effectiveness and revenue potential. Even if a campaign is not purposely driving revenue, marketers will want to know the revenue impact.

3. Common questions: trends and troubleshooting

Another key theme is monitoring trends, where people want to understand "is this trend normal?" and "if it is not normal, what happened?" Or "are we on track to beat our targets for customer acquisition?" As Marketing Analysts, it is our job to determine which trends are concerning and merit deep-dive analysis.

4. Common questions: "what if" scenarios

Another large group of questions falls into what-if scenarios, like, "if we increase spend on paid search, how many more customers will we get?" Often in annual planning cycles, marketers will be asked to cut channel spend, which leads to the question, "can we still hit our targets with lower spend?" In other cases, people will ask what the impact could be by extending campaign timing by weeks or months.

5. Common questions: optimization impact

Lastly, everyone wants to answer the question, "did our change or tactical optimization have a meaningful impact?" These questions are similar to "what if" scenarios, but look backward at the impact of changes. At times an optimization could be as simple as changing messages in an ad. Other questions focus on larger changes, like increasing spend at the regional level, or adding entirely new tactics to the marketing program.

6. Common KPI themes

A large part of answering marketing business questions is selecting appropriate measures of success. These are commonly called Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs). Later, we will go into detail on these calculations. For now, we will cover themes of KPIs that turn up in business questions. Product, operations, and finance partners want to know how marketing plays a part in overall business health. Those teams ask about KPIs like Return on Investment, or ROI, Lifetime Value, or LTV, (which is the revenue generated over their time as a customer), and overall customer retention and acquisition. Marketing partners, however, want to know about cost (per acquisition, click, and more) and how many people became customers out of those who engaged with marketing (like conversion or engagement rates).

7. Anatomy of a marketing analytics question

As we hear more marketing analytics questions, we may notice they follow a pattern. The role of the person asking the question tends to align with a related marketing lever and KPI of interest! Some examples could be a Social Media Manager asks about Twitter engagement decreasing, the COO wants a recommendation on marketing spend increase impact, or a Product Manager needs campaign acquisition performance compared to benchmarks. The pattern of aligning roles with marketing levers and KPIs helps determine how to approach reporting and analysis later!

8. Let's practice!

Time to combine some of the concepts we covered in this lesson to think about business questions, KPIs, and which partners are asking about them! We will continue to practice as if in an interview for a Marketing Analyst role.

Create Your Free Account

By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.