You never know, you might just find your Holy Grail. New ways of understanding the customer are emerging, and companies should embrace a data-first strategy. The amount of available data grows with every click, tap or touch, through every swipe, search, or share. In industries from ecommerce to media to B2B software, companies first need to wrangle the entire data set before they can try to make sense of it all, in order to report on their conclusions. But just to wrangle the data can take weeks, for even a sophisticated data science/analyst team. And by the time the results are reported and a plan put in place to execute on next steps, the data that was derived a few weeks ago has ceased to be relevant - new conclusions now have to be derived from the newest set of observations, combined with historical performance. All while data volume is growing in leaps and bounds with every ad that is viewed, website interactions, purchase, etc.

So how does a company optimize spend while keeping up with the ever-growing influx of more data? Here are 6 steps to getting started. As with any list they’re simple to outline, but are not always easy to implement:

1. Collect all the data down to the lowest levels (e.g., search terms for paid search) and keep it forever
2. Combine, blend and process the data
3. Apply machine learning, statistical models, and proven  mathematical algorithms to current and historical data
4. Display campaign performance with intuitive visualizations
5. Infer action from the visualizations
6. Take action on findings - make adjustments, pause campaigns, scale campaigns, run tests.

Having visibility on what’s being collected is a major accomplishment in itself, but to actually optimize for the highest possible ROI is the holy grail, especially as marketing spend grows to 10% or more of company revenue.

The digital marketing landscape is evolving at great speed, with new channels and ad providers (Walmart made $2.1B in advertising in 2021!) popping up. In order to survive and thrive, companies need to look beyond dashboards and reports. To keep pace digital marketers need to find solutions that remove the tedious data collecting and analysis off their plates and provide them with clear directives on what action they need to take ... and be able to clearly show the impact those actions will have on the bottom line to their managers. Condati's Quant Marketer does just that. Check it out!