Does your startup need a marketing analyst?

The role of the marketing analyst isn’t commonly understood in the C-suite — or on most marketing teams. But if you aren’t sure what your data is telling you, it may be time to invest in this hire.

6 signs it's time to hire a marketing analyst, according to the experts

For MarketerHire, I asked three marketing analytics exports about the common pain points marketing analysts can address. Here are their top six signs that a company probably needs a marketing analyst.

1. You don’t know how customers interact with your ads.

If you don't have a sense of your ads' week-over-week performance, that’s often a sign of a bandwidth problem that a marketing analyst can solve. They can take over and centralize everyone’s reporting across the marketing org, and provide more timely, actionable data.

2. You can’t understand your data.

Even after brands have reporting dashboards set up, key stakeholders typically don’t have time to monitor the dashboards, or parse the implications of trends.

Ultimately, the job of a marketing analyst is to create a communication channel between the data and the people who use it to make marketing decisions.

3. You lean heavily on performance marketing.

“If you heavily rely on performance marketing for growth, you should have a … marketing analyst regardless of the size of budget,” MarketerHire's VP of growth, Aaron Christensen said. And the more you spend on it “the more opportunity you’re leaving on the table if you don’t have those quantitative insights.”

4. You don’t know why campaign performance changed.

Say the bounce rate on one of your landing pages doubled in the past month. Your advertising and growth teams probably noticed the change, and they might even have an idea why it happened — but you don’t want them to change the ad copy, alter the landing page, and adjust spend all at once, or you could end up burning money to get murky results.

Marketing analysts can help your development team tackle problems like this methodically, using the scientific method to design precise tests.

5. You want to run new tests, but don’t have the skillset in-house.

Even marketing teams without dedicated marketing analysts tend to run experiments and do regular reporting on channel performance. But those tasks can take up a lot of time — especially if existing teams don’t have analytics or testing experience.

When managers own reporting, they can spend around 30% of their time on it, Christensen said. That time can typically be better spent on actual management.

6. You worry you’re over- (or under-) spending on a channel.

If you aren’t regularly evaluating spend and performance, “you’re leaving [an] opportunity on the table to acquire more customers,” Christensen said, “or you’re overspending.”