If I asked you a question about your marketing performance, how long would it take for you to give an accurate answer? Could you answer in a couple of seconds how your cross-channel marketing campaigns are performing?
That is what the marketing team at Funnel aims to do. We aim to simultaneously be the data experts turning numbers to meaning, the experienced marketers applying context to data, and the annoying toddler that doesn’t stop asking questions.
But of course, we need to juggle these responsibilities while doing the traditional marketing work of building social media ads, optimizing performance, staying on our marketing budget, and writing blog posts. Measuring your marketing performance shouldn’t have to be hard.
That’s why I believe the key to being a good marketer is being lazy; let me explain why.
There is a classic quote from Bill Gates which says, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”. A lazy person will be faced with thousands of questions they could investigate regarding their marketing activity, turn to all the ad platforms with rows of data, and ask themselves, “there must be an easier way.”
There is...Funnel. A platform we use daily, working closely with the development team to ensure every aspect of Funnel is built precisely for a marketer’s needs.
And because our marketing team relies on having that easier way to work with data, we have the time to give those quick and accurate answers to every question, theory, or thought and then act on our learnings to continuously improve our marketing efforts.
When the sales team needs conversion volumes per region, finance needs detailed budgets in a specific currency, and we want a new, clear dashboard to summarise performance. We have the time for all this and more because we can simply click a few buttons in Funnel to get up-to-date, reliable data however we want it.
Marketing without Funnel
But imagine if we did things the old-fashioned way and someone asks, “Hey marketing, is it cheaper to get a customer from the EU or USA?”.
Unless you’ve already conveniently invested time on that specific analysis, an answer will require you to open each platform, pull the correct data, merge these downloads in Google Sheets, tidy it all up, and hope you made no mistakes along the way.
But all this wasted time holds you back from developing actionable insights and implementing change.
This is just one of the reasons we rely on our platform.
Our marketing day with Funnel
Like all other marketers, we start our day, a coffee in one hand and the other hand opening up our laptop to check on yesterday's performance. For us, it’s a quick, painless check of our Data Studio dashboard, which has already updated itself with yesterday’s data. It was easily and quickly built months ago using Funnel to pull in data from our platforms and compare it to our internal budgets, sitting elsewhere in a Google sheet.
With the performance check done, our day is ready to begin, but not before helping the sales team with a question. They need to know if it is cheaper for us to get customers from the EU or US. This could be a big task for some marketers. It’s not for us.
We’ve got our advertising cost in each advertising platform, our customer data in our CRM, but both datasets are beautifully combined in Funnel.
In Funnel, it’s a simple case of selecting the right data, clicking the date range, and exporting to Google Sheets. 13 clicks (I checked). Once it’s in Google Sheets, I can add a quick chart and send it to sales. Done!
And how is this “geo” dimension calculated? Behind the scenes, it’s merging “country” data from each platform. To make life even easier, it can recognize and group any data attributed to the USA, US, or United States to one convenient group. And because, like all businesses, we are unique, we have built a custom dimension to group any country assigned to our EU sales team (UK, Germany, Singapore, Sweden, South Africa, etc.). Funnel gives you all that freedom on top of all the default ways of working.
Later that day, the finance team asks a typical finance question, how much did we spend on advertising every day last month in USD?
Back to Funnel to check those numbers from the default “cost” metric. The clever thing about this is that it isn’t bothered by the awkward, inconsistent ad platforms. It knows that when Google says “cost,” Facebook says “amount spent,” and Bing says “spend,” that they all mean the same thing. It understands that Google is in Euros and Facebook is in Swedish Kronor, so it asks what currency I’m after and instantly sums all advertising costs into US Dollars. Easy.
Before the day is out, we are looking at where to invest next month's budget and want to understand CPA by platform by campaign type. This is a common question for us and deserves its own detailed, updating dashboard. Whether using Data Studio, Looker, or Google Sheets, it doesn’t matter because they are all so easy and so powerful.
We need to let the platform know our unique campaign naming conventions and then we have the data aggregated how we need it. It’s up to date, it’s accurate, and it’s tailored to our needs.
We aren’t held back by a lack of time or expertise; we have direct access to all of our marketing data in the most effortless, efficient, and effective way. So we use it at every chance we get. That’s a taste of our day when we power all of our marketing data with Funnel.
So how much time do we save by using Funnel?
This is a question we get a lot. Unfortunately, I can’t give you an answer because asking that question is like asking, “how much time do you save traveling between your Stockholm office and Boston office by using an airplane?”. Ultimately people wouldn’t travel that distance without an airplane. And marketers wouldn’t fully analyze and understand their marketing performance without using Funnel.
Funnel unlocks a whole world of marketing analytics opportunities that we would never consider if we didn’t have all our data ready and waiting for analysis. Needless to say, it’s worth the marketing investment.
Are you wondering about different marketing data tools? Do you know what to include in your MarTech stack? Check out this article on various marketing data tools you should consider in 2021.
