In this episode, we speak to Bharath Gaddam, founder of Data POEM.

Prior to founding Data POEM, Bharat was involved in creating launch and media strategy for brands like ITC while working at different media agencies. He has overall 13+ years of experience.

After working in the industry for so many years, he was surprised to learn how many marketing decisions and plans were completely based on perceptions and not data. He wanted to solve this problem that led him to start Data POEM, the world’s first quick response planning platform based on deep learning.

In our conversation, we try to learn how B2B companies can plan their marketing investment for the best ROI and importance of data-driven decisions.

Here are a few learnings -

• Surprisingly, most companies are still using excel sheets for media planning. Even 20% who aren't, are using outdated tools that consider just one variable to gauge the performance of a campaign. In real life, there are multiple variables that affect it.

• Apart from understanding the ROI of your past marketing campaigns, it's very important to plan for the future (which channel and what budget to invest). Here's where the right data is critical.

• Few metrics that B2B companies should focus on are forecasted MRR, SQLs, MQLs, conversion rates for leads, and the number of brand searches month-over-month.

• Removing bias when analysing the ROI of any channel is very important. You need to get a tool that can learn the interconnected effect on channels to take the right decision.

If you want to get the maximum ROI from your marketing investments, you need to listen to Bharat Gaddam.