Reporting and attribution have revolutionized marketing in every industry. Marketing data allows businesses to make more informed decisions about their audiences’ needs, challenges, and interests.

For years, demographic reporting has done wonders for marketers. Data points such as age, ethnicity, gender, location, education, and employment have informed marketing teams and heightened the impact of campaigns across the board.

Unfortunately, there’s only so much that demographic data can tell us about the people searching for and purchasing our products and services.

2020 is the time to make data more human.

Key Takeaways & Expert Insights

Humanizing a historically inhuman component of marketing (such as reporting and attribution) can be tough. Let’s talk about a few ways to do this.

Firstly, start to switch your reporting focus from demographic data to psychographic and behavioral data. This should be a major change your organization makes in how and why you collect data. We’ll talk more about how to do this later in this article.

Secondly, expect democratization of data. Today, data is difficult to gather and is typically controlled by a dedicated marketing analytics team. While this may be a good way to collect and manage your company’s data, it can create a silo that alienates your data from the people at your company who can actually apply and learn from it.

In 2020, expect analytics teams to start making data more accessible for all employees. To jump start this process within your organization, invest in systems that automate your marketing reporting and make it easier for your employees to access that information. Teach employees how to properly apply this data, too.

Strive for efficiency and alignment across your organization. Here are a few ways to do this:

1. Align all departments within the organization around being a data-driven company and agreed-upon goals.

2. Choose and define a home for your marketing data. Where does your data live? Is it currently available? How can employees access it?

3. Avoid common marketing reporting mistakes, including one-off reports and random data pulls. These waste time and produce inconsistent data that doesn’t speak to your audience or contribute to real results.

4. Document your marketing reporting process — this might look something like: gather data, define important patterns, automate, and repeat. Instead of assigning different roles or teams to each part of the process, consider dividing up your marketing reporting workload by data source. This will allow the same people to see your data through from collection to application.

Keep Investing in Attribution to Identify Bottom-Line Impact

In 2020, continue focusing on marketing attribution reporting. When did customers first touch your brand? When did they last touch it? Where are your visitors and customers coming from?

According to our 2020 State of Marketing report, only 50% of companies are currently using attribution reporting — and almost 30% answered “No.”