With ever-growing and increasingly complex data, multichannel processes, and varied measurement mechanisms, Marketing leaders often have difficulty answering analytics questions with one-off, traditional professional services engagements. Fully in-house marketing analytics are often constrained by budget and headcount, while fully outsourced models can lack oversight, context, and alignment to real business challenges.
That’s why a hybrid approach — embedding third-party experts directly alongside internal teams — becomes essential. Embedded teams help shoulder the heavy lift: tackling the painstaking work, building new processes, and driving adoption of best practices. By working inside complex systems and closely with your teams, they combine an outside-in perspective with deep, day-to-day understanding. This enables faster, more relevant insights and the ability to adapt in real time to shifting macroeconomic factors, priorities, and strategies.
Ultimately, this model creates a more fluid dynamic across marketing organizations. It minimizes learning curves, preserves institutional knowledge, and brings the expertise of a consultancy without the limitations of static deliverables. Rather than fading in relevance after a single project cycle, embedded analytics relationships continue to build and evolve, delivering lasting value and continuously improving outputs over time.
Why embedded analytics teams create lasting value
1. Closeness to both the data and the specific business problems
Being directly embedded within your team allows third-party experts to understand nuances — from data structures to evolving priorities.Ramp up periods are significantly shortened when tackling new workstreams, causing the resulting output to be more impactful (in service of the intended goal) and relevant (to the specific needs of the stakeholders involved).
2. Expertise on emerging best practices
Blending the methodology- and industry-specific expertise of traditional consulting firms with a bias to action allows implementation of those concepts to specific, unique client applications. That team’s experience from a wide range of past work coupled with a bespoke understanding of how to effectively deliver in the existing ecosystem, allows seamless, continuous delivery of quality insights that are often unachievable with other engagement models.
3. Agility of high-impact resource deployment
Too often, novel questions go unanswered due to resource constraints; “run the business” work always takes precedence. This is especially true for marketing analytics teams. Embedded analytics elegantly solves this problem by infusing agile, high-impact resources to tackle newer problems. This agility allows this work to get done without de-prioritization of day-to-day activities.
4. Increased ability to focus on lifting and shifting the internal “analytics mindset”
As opposed to clunky, do-as-I-say attempts at enacting change (which are typically distrusted by staff), a Managed Analytics team drives innovation from within. The “teachers” start with intimate relationships with across the organization, allowing new approaches to be trusted and successful. This fosters an environment where a “lift and shift” of analytics is both well-founded and well-received.
5. Answers to broad or complex questions that may not have a clear-cut solution
Oftentimes, open-ended questions are hard to approach (and therefore hard to answer) with only internal perspectives. Having partners who understand both internal context and outside perspective creates a working relationship uniquely positioned to tackle the big questions that may not have a clear-cut solution.
Read our case study, “Embedded support transforms marketing analytics team”
Learn how a fast-moving, budget constrained team increased marketing ROI.
The jobs of embedded analytics
So what does this look like in practice? The right third-party embedded analytics team can flex across nearly any marketing analytics need, typically in three categories:
Growth
Growth activities focus on answering broad questions that help support strategic goals.
These questions come from a variety of sources, including marketing stakeholders, executives, and analytics leadership. Growth-related questions tend to be related to larger scale changes, such as “how can we increase marketing’s profitability?”, “are we thinking about marketing investment in the right way?”, or “is the way we measure success properly tied to business goals?” Oftentimes, these high-level, open-ended questions are difficult to answer with internal resources, whether due to staffing and capacity constraints or a lack of external context. Managed Analytics teams provide the capacity, outside expertise, and institutional knowledge necessary to answer them.
Process
Process activities are directly concerned with improving the existing “analytics universe”.
This type of work includes finetuning existing practices, creating new ways of delivering insight or measuring success, and upskilling internal analytics teams. Frequently, in the hectic flurry of day-to-day activities there is not enough time in the day to consider how these activities can be improved.
Measurement
Measurement & Testing encompasses the ongoing quest to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and where to shift dollars to increase effectiveness.
This scope includes both ongoing measurement efforts (MMM or Media Mix Modeling; MTA or multi-touch attribution; and last-touch attribution), as well as in-market testing (A/B testing) and analysis. These approaches can be shifted, improved, and repeated over time by employing an agile approach to understanding and improving marketing effectiveness.
Why this matters now (and how Marketbridge can help)
As marketing grows more complex, the need for embedded analytics partners — ones who work with you, not just for you — has never been greater. Whether addressing strategic challenges, improving day-to-day processes, or navigating evolving measurement needs, embedded analytics relationships drive faster, more effective outcomes.
Connect with us to see how our analytics consulting team can help!
