How to build an enterprise-level campaign taxonomy

Overview:

Only 3% of organisations’ data meets basic quality standards*, according to Harvard Business Review. Now more than ever, digital marketing success hinges on the ability to capture marketing data consistently to enable business insights and campaign optimisation.

David Ellis, MD of Station10 joined Lead Consultant Jimmy Felstead, Station10 and Kasper Rasmussen CEO Accutics, as they took a deep dive into building and aligning an enterprise-level campaign taxonomy. 

From this session you’ll learn key takeouts such as: 

–  Planning your taxonomy: how to define your goals and create your campaign tracking taxonomy from the ground up

–  Scoping and implementation: what should be included in the taxonomy, with real-life use cases

–  Reporting and optimisation: how to scale and optimise your taxonomy to meet your organisation’s evolving needs

Click here to catch up on the recording. 

Click here to download the slides. 

Full session summary:

Definitions:

• Taxonomy in marketing context can be defined as a way to group and organise data. 
• Why do we need marketing taxonomy? To solve the puzzle. Because it’s structured. 
• From search, to emails, to anything marketing channel wise = the taxonomy 
• Trustworthy campaign data sets
• That question: can you trust the data, is so important. With a taxonomy plan, you can show all the pieces of the data to build the full picture of successes and ROI. Taxonomy brings trust.

How to plan effectively the taxonomy?

What keeps heads of marketing awake? ‘I think I have gaps in my campaign data. I have a number of potentially conflicting business priorities I need to work towards. I’m being given less money to work with to deliver more.’

These are common issues faced by marketeers and an underlying set of functional data can help.

Firstly and most importantly… Understand your business, in order to fix your data you need first to take a step back and understand what are the business priorities and, what they need to capture, for what purposes, how does it play back against business objectives and what meaningful story and evidence do we need to be able to tell from the data we collect?

1. Bring people together. Buy in is key to start the process. You need senior stakeholders across the business to contribute to the overarching question ‘what data do we need to capture? Across which markets and products, against which channels and how do these activities all relate to the overarching business objectives and strategy?’. 

What data do we need to be able to report to the business on a strategic and granular level relating to our global and multi market marketing activities. 

Be clear to explain what the project is and what it is not. Relevancy is important for adoption. Ultimately it is about giving better data optimisation and insight to the business to aid growth and strategic planning. 

1. Gather information. What are we trying to achieve there? What’s the purpose of this channel? What technologies are you using to track and measure performance? Are there existing platforms to track and measure. What platforms are you reporting on? Are you using any social media platforms with ad campaign management tools?
2. Common objections. We use excel. Our agencies handle tracking etc. External suppliers and departments should all work on the same taxonomy, a shared excel file is challenging for scalability (who has the spreadsheet, who will keep it updated, etc). For enterprise-level, excel is not sufficient, it is limited to manage your data (even though Excel is very good). We get enough with our UTMs (probably fine for small businesses, but not for greater enterprises). We use google for tracking (it’s fine but more strategically, we’ve got the end of third-party at the end of the year, it’s risky, and they should move on first-party strategy, it’s really critical).
3. Translate into use cases. ‘As a marketing manager, I want to understand the performance of creative messaging across channels so that I can optimise delivery.’ 

Build out use cases across the business to ensure each element of critical data relating to the numbers, the creative, the messaging, the imagery, video etc. is being tracked i.e. Do you need to track the channel, the source, the creative type, the message, the tagline of your ad or campaign, and track what’s physically in the ad, image, video and text wise. 

Key takeaways. 

• Understand and document your business priorities. Bring the right people from the business together to get buy in and research. 

• Translate business properties into a set of use cases for the data across channels. Having a key taxonomy in place will help to define the feedback. 

• Translate use cases to data collection, business priorities, channel priorities and creative elements. 

WHAT DO I KNOW? 

What do I know about? Source, Channel, Campaign. 

What don’t I know about? Creative message. Buying model. Targeting segment. Media type. 

It’s usually unbalanced because once you have all possible options these can be taken and included in the rollout plan with a prioritisation. 

PRACTICAL EXAMPLES

Channel: Paid/Organic – Branded/Non-Branded

Source/Vendor Who is delivering the tracking from (google)

Local: Country/Language (you won’t have the same depending on the market, optimise and customise it). Focus your effort on the one that converts the most.

Funnel: See/Think/Do/Care. Could make sense for the campaign. Targeted campaign that we’re running. Is it the right use at the beginning? Track at the beginning. 

Strategy/Type: What do you want to do with that?

Objective/purpose: Awareness. Reach. Conversions. Engagement. The most important for the taxonomy.

Date: Launch. Fiscal. When we expect our conversion to happen. Customer talks about this email campaign. Even if sending weekly emails, much older emails can be performing better for example. If you have the correct email or content, effectiveness is better to drive traffic. Even old content. A client realised that they were bombarded with email a bit too much every day. Increasing the amount of email to send doesn’t have an impact.

This is a good customer and I want him to come back. Reusing the right content and channels work better. Understanding that customer behaviour overtime is great. But that’s not necessarily how it happens. How many interactions before that person actually buys? 

Taxonomy becomes powerful because you can quantify when it does work, and when it doesn’t through better quality data. 

Campaign name/business unit. Placement type (video, design, etc). It is difficult because you don’t necessarily have the resources. Start small. But effectively use your data to optimise performance. 

Key takeaways

• Understand what you know, and what you don’t know. 
• Agree on a structured approach to rolling out a taxonomy.

HOW TO SCALE & OPTIMISE 

The end goal is ‘global taxonomy’ to funnel a maximum global picture across different channels, markets and products, so you can treat it as a whole. 

And then the same thing replicated for the localised markets. You need at least 80% consistency across the markets to get consistent type of data and feedback across channels.

The idea is to provide a great foundation of consistent data. However it is important to acknowledge that some markets must be more careful about tracking. Different regulations, GDPR etc. 

The important thing is throughout your team to allow some sort of consistent data collection across a shared common platform.

USE YOU DATA! 

Don’t set the taxonomy in place and then forget to use it. Refresh it regularly, build it into the reporting and auditing process. Make this data the lifeblood of your organisation. If it’s not relevant, you shouldn’t collect it. Make sure the data is transmitted. 

CAMPAIGN TAXONOMY.

Optimise the structure of your data and follow the steps above to ensure you have data you can trust. 

QUESTIONS:

How do I find out that my data correctly works depending on the channel?

Channel reporting is always a good place to start… In terms of process, make it possible to see which departments, which agencies have been updating things. Do they need training? Don’t take just one snapshot and that’s it forever. But have a regular view of what’s going on and where to allocate resources depending on the data collected.

When it comes to maturity within the market – do you have any tips to use taxonomy when scaling up your enterprise?

How would you get the value from it? Onboarding is keypart. Make sure everyone is communicating the same way and consistently. Using the right platform to collaborate etc. 

We’d like to thank everyone involved in the webinar, giving valuable advice on how to build an enterprise-level campaign taxonomy. We also appreciate everyone that attended the event. It was great to have you there. We’re looking forward to seeing you all again for next events (along with newcomers!).

To find out more about how we can help you with your enterprise-level campaign taxonomy planning and implementation please reach out to david.ellis@station10.co.uk or russ.woodruff@station10.co.uk