Even with the growing adoption of marketing automation, CRM and web analytics tools, most marketers are still challenged to clearly demonstrate the ROI of their campaigns. In a move to fill that gap, Left Brain DGA, one of the leading demand gen consultancies, has introduced MiDash, a marketing intelligence platform aimed at using historical data, predictive analytics and performance alerts to supplement the information available from marketing automation systems.
Founded in 2009, Left Brain DGA has developed the Left Brain Model, a framework for measuring marketing’s contribution to a demand generation program and to provide a structure for the lead nurturing and scoring activities that support this process. Left Brain Model user Lenovo was the winner of Eloqua’s 2012 Demand Generation Center of Excellence Markie Award for its collaborative go-to-market strategy, commitment to persona-based content and focus on metrics to drive campaign decisions.
“Showing ROI is a huge challenge for marketers, as they attempt to make sense of data from multiple, disparate sources,” Malcolm Friedberg, CEO at Left Brain DGA, told Demand Gen Report. “MiDash fills this need by combining Left Brain DGA’s world-class consulting expertise with a proven technology. As a company, it was the next obvious problem for us to solve.”
Marketers are facing increased pressure to provide detailed performance metrics, and many are now looking for systems that will help them measure their contribution to the bottom line. “Everyone has been talking about marketing ROI, but now we’re seeing it start to happen,” said Jon Russo, Founder and CEO of B2B Fusion Group, in a recent Demand Gen Report story about marketing ROI. “Every non-marketing executive is asking ‘where is my ROI?’”
MiDash Marketing Intelligence Platform from Left Brain DGA consolidates online and off-line data to build a visual chronology of all marketing touch points throughout the marketing and sales process, Friedberg said.
“There is a fundamental problem of not being able to collect the information required to show a return on marketing investment,” Friedberg told Demand Gen Report. “If you can’t calculate ROI, how can you evaluatewhat you’ve done and ultimately determine what’s working?”
Lenovo and Sage are currently using the platform, and others are being on-boarded, Friedberg said.
MiDash unifies all sales and marketing data sources, CRM, marketing automation, web analytics, social media and financial systems. “Sales reps often go rogue and enter their own leads into CRM, causing huge data issues because the information doesn’t tie back to marketing. If that lead had previous marketing touches — such as attending a webinar or downloading a white paper — this seemingly harmless act makes it virtually impossible to get a complete picture of the buyer’s journey. MiDash takes data from the source so that problem doesn’t exist.”
Understanding the numerous pathways to purchase provides insights into pipeline velocity, the shortest path for conversion and content performance, he noted. It can also pinpoint opportunities to improve targeting, messaging and content. “Maybe you’re frustrated because your best webinar isn’t contributing to closed deals. But if you looked at the journey of a number of buyers, patterns start to emerge. Seeing things in aggregate might enable you to recognize that your webinar is actually more effective at a different point in the sales process or the content needs to be adjusted.”
Friedberg said that most marketing automation and CRM systems don’t store historical information and simply over-write key data fields. The MiDashBuyer’s Journey Builder uses historical marketing data to construct a complete buyer’s journey and highlight critical patterns among groups of buyers. “I’m sure there are a handful of marketers who attempt to use generic business intelligence tools or Excel spreadsheets to try to accomplish this, but that’s very complicated and requires a high degree of technical skill,” he said. “That’s why we built MiDash, to make this process easy.”
MiDash’s predictive capability uses the insights from the Buyer’s Journey Builder to forecast buyer behavior based on identified patterns. The feature also aids in predicting the marketing pipeline by applying historical trends and projecting future revenues. MiDash includes pre-built reports, dashboards and KPIs to help marketers quickly set up systems to capture the marketing metrics that are most valuable to their organization, Friedberg said. MiDash Goals and Alerts monitor a wide variety of marketing events such as negative trends, actual versus plan gaps, and other user defined conditions.
