Hire an Expert Marketing Analyst to

The privacy-first web broke old school measurement tactics.

The past few years took marketing analysts from nice-to-haves to must-haves. How else are you going to navigate the privacy-first web?

Modern marketing teams can’t measure performance the way they did in the golden age of paid digital. Back then, you could build a seven-figure business on drop-shipping and Facebook Ads.

Thanks to a mix of iOS changes and the rapidly approaching sunset of third-party cookies, it’s getting harder and harder to track consumer behavior online and target users with relevant ads — and to track digital marketing campaign performance. 

That’s disrupting business as usual on marketing channels from paid social to email. 

Social media platforms’ native analytics dashboards? Not robust enough to optimize an ad or campaign for conversions — let alone build a business on. 

Email analytics, too, have taken recent hits. Thanks to iOS 15, open rates are shrouded in uncertainty. 

The quantitative insights most native advertiser dashboards offered out of the box in 2020, now require in-house, custom business intelligence solutions. 

Most marketers don’t have the skills — or the bandwidth — to build in-house marketing data management solutions in a rapidly-changing, privacy-first environment.

This is why so many companies are turning to marketing analysts to track their marketing teams’ performance.

A marketing analyst can modernize how you measure ROI.

The role of the marketing analyst is always evolving, but it comes with some well-established benefits. 

For one, marketing analysts centralize and standardize measurement for the whole marketing team, monitoring and reporting on department- and channel-level performance — so your team doesn’t have to. 

They make it easier to figure out your best and worst channels at a glance, and they’re great at finding creative ways to clarify fuzzy metrics — whether that’s the impact of podcast sponsorships, or conversions from Facebook Ads. 

Their mission? To figure out where your marketing spend makes the most impact. 

Where marketing ROI remains stubbornly uncertain, a marketing analyst can design appropriately controlled experiments to measure channel- or campaign-level impact, and draw on deep statistical knowledge to pull data-driven conclusions from test results. 

Ultimately, hiring a marketing analyst helps you bring your marketing measurement methods — and your marketing strategy — into 2022. You can’t rely on Facebook analytics and third-party cookies forever. 

Figure out what’s next with the help of a marketing analyst.

A marketing analyst needs these 6 skills.

How do you spot a marketing analyst who can level up your measurement capabilities? 

Credentials like bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees, or certifications in Google Analytics or Microsoft Excel — they’re great, but they aren’t enough to guarantee success on the marketing analyst career path. 

Great candidates in this role have a special skillset — one few other marketing specialists have — that they developed through not only formal training, but work experience and real-world problem-solving. 

Key skills for the marketing analyst role include:

• Advanced data analytics and statistics: A marketing analyst’s expertise here goes deep. Using statistical software and running multivariate analyses is no problem for them, and they know which regressions make the most sense for which data sets.
• Forecasting and predictive modeling: A marketing analyst has the data science chops to build a forecasting model without overfitting to existing data or ignoring key variables. This can help you gauge your growth trajectory and avoid oversaturating channels. 
• Attribution modeling: If a customer sees your ads on multiple channels before buying, how should you attribute that revenue? Marketing analysts assess that for e-commerce shops, brick-and-mortar establishments, and hybrid businesses.  When first- and last-touch attribution don’t fit, they create custom multi-touch attribution models. 
• Dashboard building: Using tools like Looker and Tableau, marketing analysts can build custom dashboards and data visualizations for different marketing stakeholders, so they can easily access relevant graphs of channel or team performance over time.
• SQL coding: SQL is the language commonly used for querying data warehouses directly — something the best marketing analysts can do autonomously. 
• Communication: Excellent marketing analysis is nothing if a candidate can’t clearly communicate their methods and findings. They should be able to speak conversationally about the “why” behind their hypotheses, noteworthy performance shifts and any impactful changes in market conditions and market trends.

Hire a marketing analyst to make data-driven decisions.

What’s the best process for hiring a marketing analyst? To recruit effectively, there are a couple key steps you need to go through — and you should do a few before you even post the job.

• Audit your data. What historical marketing data do you have? How far back does it go — and how detailed, reliable and clean is it? This is the raw material your marketing analyst will have to work with, and you need to know what state it’s in before you get started. 
• Define your needs. Some companies will need help collecting, storing and cleaning relevant marketing data; others have their data infrastructure all set up, and need help more with data analysis, forecasting or marketing mix modeling. Communicate your situation clearly in your marketing analyst job description to find candidates equipped for (and excited about!) your top priorities. 
• Ask relevant screening questions. Don’t just ask them how many years of experience they have. Have them walk you through relevant projects they did in past jobs — the types of dashboards they’ve built and experiments they’ve run — and how they think. How do they make decisions about experimental design? KPIs to track?
• Try assigning a take-home test or presentation. It shouldn’t be a huge lift, but assigning candidates a deliverable gives you an unfiltered glimpse of their work and a sense of how they might communicate with strategists and other key collaborators.

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A freelance marketing analyst may make the most sense.

Here’s the thing: You don’t necessarily need to hire a full-time marketing analyst. Freelancers work just as well — if not better — for that role.

Recruiting a full-time marketing analyst is time-consuming, and committing to one candidate — no matter how excellent — involves some risk. If you’re not a marketing analyst yourself, it’s tough to vet talent rigorously enough. 

Even if they excelled on their take-home assignment, there may be hidden holes in their experiment designs — or they may have a tough time iterating on their hypotheses in a real-world work environment. 

You don’t want to sink a ton of time and money into recruiting, then realize you didn’t find the right fit. There’s a hefty opportunity cost to those types of missteps.

But until you start working with a marketing analyst candidate and making decisions based on their models, it’s hard to fully assess their analytical chops, and how well they understand your business. 

Why not work directly with a pre-vetted freelance marketing analyst from MarketerHire’s network? It’s the cheapest, most flexible way to solve your marketing measurement problems. If your needs change, you can update your marketing org structure in a flash.  

Marketing on the privacy-first web is evolving rapidly, and companies need to stay agile. Freelance marketers help you keep your marketing operating costs low and your ROI high.