Introducing Paramark!
Sep 1, 2023
The marketing ROI problem
I'm Pranav, one of the co-founders of Paramark. Together with Pete, my co-founder, I started Paramark to scratch our own itch. As a VP of Marketing at both a startup and a public company, I was sorely disappointed with the state of marketing technology.
Despite thousands of tools in the martech landscape (check out Scott Brinker's amazing work), I found few solutions that could handle the needs of fast-growing marketing teams. They were either incomplete, hard to use, or claiming things that were just flat-out wrong!
This trend is especially true for marketing analytics. Synthesizing and analyzing marketing data to understand effectiveness should be a solved problem. After speaking to hundreds of marketing leaders at some of the fastest growing companies, I was honestly surprised that the truth is far from it. Understanding and communicating the return on marketing investment continues to be one of the top challenges for marketers.
That's why we decided to build Paramark. Our goal is to help fast-growing marketing teams measure and forecast the impact of their investments, unlocking sustainable growth.
Why has no one solved this?
Over the last year, we researched the landscape and finally understood the reason behind the gap. Marketers have no system of record and no way to reliably communicate their impact! Marketers keep trying various touch-based attribution vendors that claim to address this challenge. While those vendors are certainly trying their best, ultimately they've delivered confusing reports that are riddled with errors, leading to bad decision-making.
Marketing and marketing analytics leaders are left with no choice but to cobble together their own DIY solutions. They spend multiple hours a week wrangling data in their own pet spreadsheets, constantly fielding questions about broken integrations, reconciling data between their tools and those spreadsheets, and then figuring out a way of communicating all this to execs, sales, and finance.
For a moment, it seemed like there was a glimmer of hope. There was a new crop of attribution vendors tackling this challenge in both the consumer and enterprise space. They promised to solve the challenges of marketing analytics through multi touch attribution.
However, after much research, I can confidently say that multi-touch attribution is ridden with errors that lead to bad decision making. Furthermore, business leaders want to understand how much incremental value their marketing organization is driving, and multi-touch attribution just doesn't answer that question.
The status quo is getting even more complex. Privacy changes — from GDPR to Apple's App Tracking Transparency to tracking protection in browsers — are breaking touch-based attribution even further. Buying journeys are changing rapidly, with new media formats like short-form video taking a greater role. And the new macroeconomic reality of inflation and interest rate rises requires businesses to be much more efficient. The burden of proof of marketing's incrementality just got that much heavier.
What's our approach?
We've designed Paramark to address all of these challenges. We're using proven statistics and machine learning to understand the correlation and causation between marketing activities and business outcomes. And, we do this in a privacy-friendly way that doesn't rely on personally identifiable information (PII). Read more about the underlying methodologies here - Marketing Mix Modeling and experimentation.
While these techniques aren't new, there are several blockers we've had to overcome.
First, how do you make these techniques actionable for marketing and finance teams? Advanced data science methods are only useful when combined with the insights and understanding of a marketing analyst.
Second, how do you enable these techniques to work in real-time or near real-time? Having data once a year or once a quarter is no longer enough. Modern marketing requires weekly and monthly updates.
Finally, how do you translate charts and tables into real action? To maximize impact adopting a culture of experimentation is key.
After months of research and development, we're excited to give you a sneak peek at what we're building. Now, you can confidently understand and grow the impact of your marketing investments. Our methodology works across all types of channels — paid, earned, and owned. Brand and performance. Online and offline. Top of funnel and bottom of funnel.
Don't just take our word for it. Here's what top marketing leaders feel about our vision and solution:
"This is the holy grail... I'm always trying to find a way to justify marketing ROI to all of my constituents" - VP of Marketing & Growth at a public company.
"I've been desperate to find a better, more scientific, less fluffy way of measuring marketing!" - CMO at a Series-D / Pre-IPO company
"Marketers often confuse descriptive analytics for causal analytics. I think this is so powerful - this is what everyone's looking for!" - Marketing & Business Operations, Series-D consumer tech company
If you'd like to explore how you can measure and forecast the impact of your marketing team, let's chat.