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.
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.
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:
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.
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.