When launching an analytics initiative, marketers too often underestimate the importance of adoption management – in other words, getting people to buy into and use the program you’re rolling out. Sound easy?
In many cases, it’s not. While most will readily buy into the need for improved analytics, when it comes to integrating a new analytics program into the daily business process, in many instances, things go awry. Key stakeholders may refuse to accept the results or perhaps didn’t understand them well enough to take action.
Insights without business context are useless. You can have the most comprehensive set of performance metrics across media, but if you can’t integrate these capabilities into your business processes and allocation decisions, your metrics won’t have any real impact. Particularly when a decision-support tool is involved (e.g., simulation, optimization, forecasting).
To ensure adoption of your efforts a few things to consider:
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Map your current business process to set the context for how your analytics efforts will work within the established process;
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Developed a tiered plan for adoption. Developing a measurement mind-set is an evolution – don’t take the big bang approach;
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Get the right players involved from the beginning. Those responsible for making the decisions on how to allocate investments must be solid in their support or they won’t use the findings. And without taking the time to give them the opportunity to voice their input or even debate results, you’ll be missing out on those who should be your biggest advocates.
Adoption management is an important aspect to consider when evaluating analytics partners as well. Be sure to scrutinize the adoption track record of these vendors, asking questions such as:
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Can you provide examples of actual results achieved through implementing your recommendations (e.g., use cases)?
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What challenges can I expect in executing your recommendations and what approaches do you typically take to overcome these issues?
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How well do you actually understand the business process specific to our vertical? Articulate for me how we manage the customer lifecycle.
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What is your discovery process to better understand our current situation?
There’s no question that the science of marketing has improved dramatically with the increase in data and the evolution of more sophisticated analytics tools. But without an adoption management plan, marketers can end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on analytics initiatives that ultimately have no real impact on the business. Statistical confidence in the math is important, but the believability of results – and the conviction to take action on them – is what really drives successful analytics programs.