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What You Should Know Before Becoming a Marketing Data Analyst

Pros and cons from my experience in marketing analytics

Photo by Joshua Miranda from Pexels
Photo by Joshua Miranda from Pexels

It’s common for a data analyst to support Marketing but there’s not much information telling you what it’s actually like being a marketing data analyst. Having supported marketing as a data analyst in multiple companies I want to discuss my experience and what’s in store if you decide to take on a marketing analytics role.


Endless ideas

Marketers have a lot of ideas and they need to have this ability to be successful in their job. Unfortunately, this also means the data requests come off the top of their head as new ideas form. Anticipate additional time to understand the marketing goal and refine the requirements for the analysis.

Hard to measure impact

Marketing attribution can be difficult because there’s no system in place to set up tracking for all marketing campaigns. As a result, getting the true ROI on marketing spend may not be possible. Marketing will still ask you to calculate ROI with imperfect data and often times it’ll be hard to definitively say that marketing had an impact. The best I could say was directionally I could see a spike in a marketing KPI when the campaign was launched. Prepare to be creative in the absence of attribution data to calculate ROI on marketing spend.

Requests need to be done yesterday

Marketing is very responsive to business needs. The downside is when they make a request they also want it done immediately. Even if the company follows the Agile framework and has sprint planning you may have new requests that pushes current tickets to the next sprint. In some cases, there’s a business need to complete the request immediately and you need to be prepared to switch gears and focus on the new request. This is much more common in marketing compared to other divisions like product.

Strategy shifts often

Sometimes the business shifts focus or the existing marketing strategy is not having the expected impact and a new strategy is formed. This means tickets related to the old strategy may no longer apply and work you’ve done will be irrelevant. Expect marketing priorities to change and don’t take it personally if your analysis is unused.

Creativity first

Some marketers may lack data literacy because they have a creative job. This is not to say marketers are not data driven but you may have to spend more time figuring out how to effectively explain your data results. The upside is you get lots of practice explaining results to less data savvy stakeholders and this will help you develop your communication skills.

Domain knowledge

If you don’t have domain knowledge in marketing, make sure you read up on common marketing concepts and terminology. This knowledge is helpful to guide marketing because they may not know the right data questions to ask. Search terminology such as SEO and SEM, email metrics such as open and click through rates, and website tracking concepts such as cookies and sessions may be referenced in data requests and having this domain knowledge will help you ask the right questions.

Conclusion

What I listed above makes it sound like marketing is difficult to support compared to other divisions but there are pros as well.

  • Marketers are the best promoters because it’s in their nature to persuade. If you do a great job supporting them they will sing your praises across the organization. This will help you gain visibility with senior leadership and help you when your name comes up for a promotion.
  • Marketing concepts are universal and supporting marketing will help you understand an essential part of a business wherever you decide to work.
  • Some data analyst jobs support multiple functions such as marketing and product and having prior experience in at least one domain will increase your chances compared to a candidate without any domain experience.
  • If you decide to start a business of your own one day you’ll already be familiar with marketing practices and won’t need to start learning from scratch.

Even though there are challenges working as a marketing data analyst it’s a worthwhile experience and I hope this has not discouraged you from giving marketing analytics a try.


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