Follow these eight steps to rise up out of the marketing data weeds and start beautifully communicating the business impact of everything marketing does.

1. EIGHT KEYS TO DOING CROSS-CHANNEL REPORTING RIGHT
MARKETING’S
TRUE IMPACT

2. You simply can’t walk into the boardroom with
reports showing how many clicks an email
achieved. Single-channel reporting (what
search delivered, what TV did and so on)
is easy to do because it’s how we tend to be or-
ganized. It’s how we divide the labor amongst
our agencies, and it’s how our specialized
execution tools work, so typically it’s all we do.
But how does one channel compare to the oth-
ers? And how do digital channels compare to
other parts of the marketing mix—like events,
radio, PR and social? What’s the role of each?
What’s working best across it all? How is any
of it impacting business results? That is what
your executives want to know: The Big Picture.
There is no shortage of marketing data. In fact “data exhaust”
is flowing from everything we marketers touch. The paradox
is that your company’s leadership couldn’t care less about any
one of those channel-specific data points.
Cross-channel reporting may be harder, but it’s
vital if you want to understand and optimize
your marketing effectiveness in a world with
so many ways to spend your marketing dollars.
Marketing leaders must be able to synthesize
the data and tell the marketing story in terms
of business results. Rory Finlay, a marketing
executive recruiter for Egon Zehnder, agrees:
“… if you want to be a highly sought after market-
ing leader over the next five years … prepare
yourself to serve as the overall integrator of the
marketing function in all its modern complexity.”
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Your integration story will be told through cross-channel
reporting. Here are eight keys to doing it right:
1. CONTROL YOUR MARKETING
SUCCESS STORY
Don’t leave the question, “Is my
marketing working?” to IT, finance
analysts or agencies to answer.
It’s an idea whose time has come: marketing
data for marketers. It no longer takes months
of research by a certified data analyst with
high-level security clearance to create a mar-
keting performance re-
port. Data is abundant,
and accessible to
all sorts of business
partners in the organi-
zation, from finance
to IT. Each group
thinks they can make
sense of your market-
ing data and report in-
sightfully on what you
are doing. However,
it’s now possible for
you to manage your
own reporting, track the effectiveness of your
own marketing plan, and control your own
performance story.
It’s a revolutionary opportunity. Imagine no lon-
ger having to go through (and wait for) those
other departments that traditionally curate
marketing metrics and who get to say, “Here’s
how marketing is performing.” Because what
they don’t have is a marketer’s insight—the syn-
thesis of knowledge and experience that offers
the deepest, most powerful understanding of
what the data reveals. If your marketing team
can’t easily view and use metrics that are in the
language of marketing and take appropriate
action, then what’s the point of tracking them?
Bringing ownership of your metrics and report-
ing in-house is the first step toward cultivating
the marketing-specific insights that lead to mar-
keting-specific action. Democratize marketing
data. Bring it home. Put it in the hands of your
people.
2. SEEK
ANSWERS TO
YOUR MOST
IMPORTANT
QUESTIONS
Don’t get distract-
ed by data visual-
ization tools or
the tactic du jour;
focus on what you need to know.
Everything you do is in service to larger goals.
Instead of thinking about beautiful pie charts
you’d like to create, list the essential and
enduring business questions for which you
need answers at your fingertips. These might
include:
If your marketing team can’t
easily view and use metrics
that are in the language of
marketing and take
appropriate action, then
what’s the point of tracking
them?

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with the same objective based on how well
each delivers. For example, for driving net new
relationships, the channels that were the most
effective (and cost-effective) were X, Y and Z.
4. BE ABLE TO ARTICULATE
MARKETING’S IMPACT ON BUSINESS
OBJECTIVES
Align your reporting with the organiza-
tion’s overall strategy.
Put the big strategic objectives for the brand
and business front and center and report on
those. How much is marketing spending on
each business objective? What initiatives are
aligned against each objective, and which are
getting results? That's what leadership cares
about.
5. AGILE MARKETING REQUIRES
TIMELY DATA
If cross-channel marketing data isn’t
continuously flowing and populating
your reports, agile marketing will
remain an elusive dream.
The point of reporting is to know what’s
working and what’s not working so that you
can do more of the former (as fast as possible)
and less of the latter (as fast as possible). If
cross-channel reporting is difficult to come by,
it probably won’t get done very often. When
learning is left to the annual “year in review”
• How is marketing moving the needle on our top
brand objectives?
• Which channels, messages, offers and
campaigns are making the biggest impact?
• What are the key insights and most important
takeaways from our last big initiative?
• How much are we spending on each part of the
funnel and is that the right allocation?
• Of all the lead generation tactics we are
running, which are proving to be the most
cost-effective? The least cost-effective?
3. USE METRICS FOR THE BIG
PICTURE
Get out of the data weeds.
Don’t just report on single-channel metrics:
friends, fans, followers, GRPs, clicks, opens,
impressions, and on and on ad nauseam.
Assemble those metrics into categories and
contexts that are cross-channel, aggregated
and holistically meaningful. Here are three
examples:
• Track Paid media, Owned media, Earned media
and the ratios between them as indicators of
the health of a brand's paid efforts, and as
an early indicator of positive (or negative)
business outcomes.
• Report on your funnel (for instance, Awareness,
Engagement and Revenue), not the individual
metrics that aggregate up to it (but be sure
you know those as well).
• Force rank each channel against the others

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firm? Where’s the API to your brand tracker
study? Where’s the API to your agencies?
Just because such APIs don’t exist doesn’t
mean the data is less valuable. If you’re not
analyzing all the data that matters—including
unstructured, hard-to-harness data—then
you’re treading water with your reporting and
limiting your insights.
8. “WHAT’S WORKING” IS MORE
THAN THE NUMBERS (AS EVERY
MARKETER KNOWS)
Assemble the complete picture.
If your boss asked you
whether a particular
campaign was
working, you would
never respond based
on the metrics alone.
You would consider the strategy, the primary
intent of the campaign, the creative, the
media placements… in other words, the full
picture. The same principle applies to your
ongoing reporting. Understanding what’s
working, what’s not, and what to do next
takes more than a dashboard of performance
indicators. Ideally, you’d have a marketing
“system of record”—the brief, budget and
spend, continuously updated performance
metrics, key documents, the creative, and
your team’s comments, insights and lessons
learned all together in one place. (The
collective email inboxes of everyone in the
marketing department doesn’t count.)
You might assume that your agencies hold all
hind-sighting deck, it means zero chance to
optimize in real time and, consequently, money
wasted on underperforming tactics.
6. BEWARE THE “GARBAGE IN,
GARBAGE OUT” DILEMMA
Normalize your data to make reporting
easy and reliable.
Marketing is messy. Marketing data is messier.
One tool measures clicks one way, another tool
measures them differently. The US spreadsheet
is labeled “direct mail pieces” while the UK’s
is labeled “door drops.” If your data isn’t
normalized on the way
in—cleaned up and
tagged per a sensible
taxonomy—then your
reporting will be errat-
ic and unreliable. Even
the most beautiful data visualization tool can’t
save you from the “garbage in” dilemma. No
matter how fabulous that color-coded donut
graph looks, if the data was messy on the way
in, then the donut is useless.
7. UTILIZE THE DATA THAT MATTERS,
NOT JUST WHAT’S EASY
Don’t overlook unstructured data
sources.
Typically, IT only captures the marketing data
that’s easily accessible: the stuff available via
nice, neat APIs. But where’s the API to your PR
Your brand needs to own and
manage its marketing data.

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that somewhere. But agencies come and go,
and if you’ve handed off your organizational
memory to them, it can mean starting from
square one. Your brand needs to own and
manage its marketing data or else suffer from
marketing “Groundhog Day” where you have
to learn it over and over again.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
With so many ways for marketers to reach
their audience and deliver their message,
tracking and analyzing channel performance
has never been more important. It may seem
daunting to get solid cross-channel reporting
up and running, especially if marketing has
never managed that function before. But being
intentional and strategic in your approach
is half the battle and there are partners and
platforms that can help. Once you’re set up
and the data is flowing automatically, the
benefits will flow as well. You’ll enjoy a clear
and continuous view of which channels and
initiatives are positively impacting the business
and which are simply draining the budget.
You’ll gain unprecedented insight into what
moves the needle. And you’ll finally control
your own success story.
ABOUT BECKON
Beckon is omni-channel analytics software for marketing in all its modern complexity. Our
software-as-a-service platform integrates messy marketing data and delivers rich dashboards for
cross-channel marketing intelligence. Built by marketers for marketers, Beckon is the dashboard
to the CMO—industry best-practice analytics and marketing-impact metrics right out of the box
for ultra-fast time to marketing value. Beckon serves marketers who want to bring order to chaos,
make data-informed optimization decisions, and tell the marketing story in terms of business
impact. Find your strength in numbers with Beckon.
LEARN MORE
Contact us for a complimentary consultation to find out how Beckon can help you better demonstrate
the marketing contribution at your organization.
SALES@BECKON.COM
107 SOUTH B STREET, SUITE 300
SAN MATEO, CA 94401