Book Review: The Analytical Marketer: How to Transform Your Marketing Organization

The Analytical Marketer book cover - Amazon

I recently finished a great book called The Analytical Marketer: How to Transform Your Marketing Organization by Adele Sweetwood, who served as the SVP of Global Marketing and Shared Services for SAS when she authored this. As an older organization (SAS was founded in 1966 to analyze agricultural data), it needed to structurally and mentally overhaul the way it approached marketing.

This book packs value in a short, easy format. It was written in 2016, but her timeless insights are about process and decision-making (versus tactics), so it’s going to stay relevant for awhile. Sweetwood gives advice on classic topics such as building relationships, working cross-functionally, and getting management’s buy-in. I absolutely loved this read – I went through it multiple times with highlighters and post-it notes.

What to know before you read:

  • This book is friendly, approachable, and simple. It’s not an academic book, which makes it so much easier to digest the information.
  • Expect redundancy. Sweetwood repeats ideas and mantras. For example, she often reiterates that the whole organization needs to have an analytical mindset and that it doesn’t work if there’s just one statistician crunching the numbers. But I appreciate the redundancy – I won’t be forgetting those key points anytime soon.
  • This is an awesome book for marketers of all career stages.
    • If you’re a manager, you’ll find a lot of advice on how to work with other departments. Reshaping a whole company to be more data-minded requires C-suite and cross-department buy-in on items such as:
      • Developing new internal tools
      • Spending money on resources
      • Creating and hiring for new roles
    • If you’re a junior marketer, this book will help you make advance notes of what you should know in order to get promoted. You might have to Google a few words and re-read some chapters, but you’ll be thinking leaps and bounds ahead of your peers. This book gets you in the headspace to be a leader. For more on how you should position yourself for a promotion in marketing, check out this article.
  • The Analytical Marketer did a stellar job of covering insights from other teams (sales, IT, finance). No team can exist alone, so an amazing marketing team can’t succeed if the rest of the company doesn’t understand what marketing does. Sweetwood argues that marketers must figure out how to make these valuable connections with the finance, sales, and IT departments.
  • Sweethood is also realistic about the uphill battle that marketers face around having their work taken seriously. It used to be impossible to track the ROI of traditional marketing (billboards, TV spots, magazine ads), so the department was viewed as a money pit. Even though today’s modern marketing channels and tools can now demonstrate marketing’s real impact on the bottom line, many leaders who grew up with traditional marketing still see it as a cost center. Sweetwood points out that a ton of effort goes into making sure that marketing is seen as a revenue-generator.
  • At the end of the book, there is a section with sample job descriptions for new types of roles (Data Visualization, Segmentation, Content, Web Usability, etc.). These are super interesting if you’re looking for new opportunities. I have several friends in these types of newer roles, and they’re well-paid.

Summary

I’m summarizing the highlights below but these bullet points don’t do the book justice. You can get your copy ofThe Analytical Marketer here!

Introduction

  • This book is a guide for leaders who want to transform their marketing organizations, told through the real example of SAS.
  • There are 4 key pieces involved in this transformation:
    • Mindset: From reactive to proactive
    • Talent: From traditional to modern
    • Leadership: From responsive to agile
    • Structure: From silos to convergence

Chapter 1 – The Customer Decision Journey Has Changed

  • Note to reader: check out more on the differences between traditional and digital marketing here
  • A one-size-fits-all marketing approach simply does not work anymore. We want to avoid this ‘peanut butter strategy’ of trying to be everywhere equally. We have to get more personalized with our marketing messages.
  • Marketing is no longer just about pretty photos and cool videos – it’s also about the delivery.
    • Which distribution channels should we use for different pieces of content? How should we frame the message? What are all the potential touchpoints for connecting with customers?

Chapter 2 – Adopting an Analytical Mindset

  • This chapter is about preparing your organization to handle data. You can’t just become a data-based organization overnight. You have to lay the groundwork by equipping your company with different skillsets, resources, and tools.
  • Marketers are now producers and consumers of data
    • Companies have to commit to properly stewarding customer data. The decisions are only as good as the data you use to make them!
  • SAS realized that they had overwhelming amounts of data coming in from disparate channels. The company created one big ‘data mart’ to combine all of this data so that everyone in the company could refer to one transparent source of truth.
    • Data from sales, marketing, and customer service was now available to everyone in a standard format
  • Organizations need to objectively evaluate where they are in the analytical journey and prepare themselves for it. Here are some questions that Sweetwood asks:
    • How long does it take your team to execute a campaign?
    • Who’s involved?
    • How quickly can you respond to events?
    • What do you do when things fail or succeed?

Chapter 3 – Realigning Your Structure 

  • This is a hefty chapter that explains how a company’s organizational structure plays a huge role in harmonious function.
  • Within the marketing team, SAS added a go-to-market leader role to orchestrate efforts between teams. This person essentially:
    • Understands team members with different expertise/skills and brings them into the marketing campaign at the right moments
    • Acts as the connective tissue between teams
    • Analyzes customer data to understand the sweet spot – how does this customer react to marketing and what do they need?
  • SAS also realized that every team (social media, email, etc.) was creating their own content. This created several issues. Teams were often duplicating effort and there was no standard for content quality. The company decided to create one resource team, called “shared marketing services,” to take care of the whole company’s content needs.
    • Generating content is a big effort. It involves the strategy of content, the actual writing and creation of content, and the marketing of content.
      • This company-wide resource would create, organize, and quality-check the materials
      • The team also analyzed responses and ran experiments to make sure they only spent time on really helpful, valuable content
  • This chapter then dives into why the marketing team needs to closely partner with other teams to succeed:
  • Marketing + IT
    • As mentioned, data is tremendously important to marketing. Data needs to be stored, integrated, modeled, and analyzed by IT.
    • IT needed to be looped in early on marketing initiatives so they can allocate resources and people to these tasks 
    • SAS even created a new job to liaise between marketing and IT
  • Marketing + Sales
    • These two teams definitely need to be in a constant feedback loop because they have a shared goal of bringing in new customers.
      • Marketing needs information from Sales about which campaigns performed best and which leads converted
      • At SAS, Marketing and Sales learned each other’s “languages” so they could discuss targets and objectives
    • A new cross-team role of Client Manager was created. This person examines marketing campaigns from a sales perspective.
  • Marketing + Finance
    • The purpose of establishing a good relationship with Finance is to show how impactful the marketing expenses were and to show that Marketing has a real ROI on the business.
      • Having data on marketing campaign results makes it possible to report objectively to Finance

Chapter 4: Building Talent and Skills

  • As a company gets more data-focused, your people need to have the requisite skills.
    • SAS had to bring in the right new people and also train the existing employees
    • Building an analytical organization is about bringing the left and right brain together
  • Here is Sweetwood’s starter checklist of traits and skills that great analytical marketers should have:
    • Sales: Know how to close deals
    • Social Media: Participate as a consumer and see what good brand-to-customer dialogue looks like
    • Journalism and Story-telling: Learn to crank out juicy content
    • Process Design: Visualize the whole process of deploying marketing automation (project management, training people, learning tech)
    • Data and Analytics: Have a passion and curiosity for the numbers
    • Domain Expertise: Really know the customers’ pain points
    • Collaboration: Communicate exceptionally
    • Creativity and Innovation: Continually reach for the next idea
    • Leadership: Take risks, drive change, build trust
  • SAS bucketed marketing into:
    • Digital Marketing (paid media, such as ads)
    • Content Marketing (whitepapers and blog posts to provide value to customers)
    • Marketing Science (the analysis of marketing results)
    • Customer Experience (keeping existing customers happy)

Chapter 5: Leading the Analytical Organization

  • This chapter explains the types of leaders that analytical organizations need. “Change management” is a special type of skill.
  • Leadership, especially within an organization that’s undergoing any sort of transformation, is a soft art. Leaders show people that change is necessary and may be difficult.
  • Leaders lead by example:
    • They actually use the tools and softwares that they’re telling their people to use
    • They are selective and resourceful with investments
    • They demonstrate their team’s value and champion their accomplishments
  • Leaders need to know how to tell stories and explain to people why they will benefit from change
  • Leaders need to give people permission to try and fail (actually)! Employees need to feel safe pursuing big ideas.

Conclusion: What’s Next

  • In this concluding chapter, Sweetwood summarizes the action plan that a marketing team should implement in order to become a more data-forward organization.
  • Your roadmap
    • Evaluate – where are you right now?
    • Nurture relationships – build a guiding coalition of change agents
    • Embrace change – drive actions and celebrate wins

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If the book sounds like a good fit for you, I hope you enjoy the book as much as I did! You can find The Analytical Marketer: How to Transform Your Marketing Organization here.

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