Customer_case

How 3M Built a Connected Campaign Intelligence Layer

3M introduced shared campaign tracking standards to bring greater consistency to marketing data across teams and platforms. As a result, paid media activity could be connected with Salesforce opportunities, giving the team clearer visibility into marketing's contribution to business results.

3M is a global science and technology company behind thousands of products and solutions across industries including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and consumer goods.

Industry: Diversified technology & manufacturing
Headquarters: St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Technology ecosystem: Adobe Analytics
Accutics use case: Campaign governance, naming conventions & marketing data standardization

Webinar

Hear it from 3M

Lucy Egan, Global Paid Media Enablement Leader, shares how 3M uses Accutics to establish consistent campaign standards across teams, channels, and platforms.

Discover how a shared foundation helps reduce fragmented reporting, connect performance signals across the customer journey, and support better-informed marketing decisions.

Watch the webinar

The_customer_journey

Customers rarely follow a straight path to purchase. So how can teams understand the value of their media investment when engagement happens across different channels and long before a buying decision?

For 3M, understanding the full customer journey meant addressing three key priorities:

Unify media investment and performance
Create a consistent view of paid media spend and performance across business groups, markets, and channels to better understand where marketing investments deliver value.
Connect marketing to sales opportunities
Link campaign engagement to sales opportunities to better understand marketing's contribution to pipeline and identify the activities influencing business growth.
Capture the full pre-purchase journey
Build visibility into early-stage interactions across campaigns and channels to understand how customers engage long before an opportunity or buying decision emerges.

The_challenge
One company, many marketing realities
For a global company like 3M, marketing spans multiple business groups, regions, and markets, each with distinct customers, priorities, and ways of working. Managing this complexity across different platforms made it difficult to establish a consistent view of marketing performance.
Even small differences in campaign naming created challenges for reporting. Without standardized identifiers and shared definitions, connecting activities across channels and business groups become increasingly difficult.
Lucy shared a simple example: a campaign might be named car_care in one platform and car care in another. The difference seems minor, but without a consistent identifier, reporting systems may not recognize that both refer to the same activity.
The opportunity extended beyond reporting. A unified view of marketing investments and performance would help teams better understand the customer journey, evaluate cross-channel effectiveness, and make more informed investment decisions.
The goal was not to collect more data, but to make better use of what was already available, bringing greater consistency and confidence to marketing measurement.

Lucy EganGlobal Paid Media Enablement Leader, 3M

The_solution

Start with the foundation

Rather than introducing another reporting tool, Lucy focused on improving how 3M used its existing technology.

Establish shared marketing standards

Marketers were already familiar with creating UTM parameters. Using Accutics, 3M built on that process to establish more consistent naming conventions, tracking structures, and campaign definitions.

Enable existing systems to work better together

Shared identifiers helped create a common way to recognize related activities across platforms and reporting environments.

Make standards practical for everyday use

Alongside these standards, 3M worked on improving reporting processes, consolidating advertising accounts, and simplifying its agency setup.

Business_value

Connect media investment to business opportunities

The impact of this work is reflected in 3M's improved visibility into paid media performance.

With more consistent campaign data and reporting processes, teams can now analyze media investment across paid channels in a single dashboard, filtering by business group, division, or campaign.

By connecting this view with website engagement, marketing automation activity, and associated Salesforce opportunities, 3M can better understand how marketing investments contribute to sales.

How much have we invested across channels?
What engagement has that investment generated?
Which opportunities can be associated with the activity?

Looking_ahead

People and the next chapter

Bring people along for the journey
Improving measurement across a global organization requires more than shared technology. Different business groups have established processes, priorities, and agency relationships. Standards must work for the people expected to use them.
Lucy and her team approached the challenge by focusing on outcomes. Instead of asking teams to follow naming conventions simply because they were required, she demonstrated how consistency could improve reporting and visibility into investment. 3M began with business groups willing to pilot the approach, using practical examples to build support for broader adoption.
The next chapter of marketing measurement
3M has made progress in understanding paid media investment, bringing performance information together, and connecting campaign activity with wider opportunities. Lucy is clear that the measurement journey is not finished. The organization is now exploring how to understand earlier customer engagement, longer-term brand influence, and signals of future demand.
Better reporting has not eliminated the difficult questions about marketing investment, though it has created a stronger starting point for answering them. The goal is not simply to produce more detailed dashboards. It is to understand how marketing contributes to business growth, including the value created long before a customer is ready to buy.

Five_lessons

Five lessons for marketing leaders

3M’s journey offers practical guidance for organizations seeking greater clarity on media investment and the customer journey.

01
Start with the decisions you want to improve
Identify what your leadership team needs to understand about marketing investment. Work backward from those questions to the data, definitions, and processes required.
02
Create consistency where marketing data begins
Shared naming conventions and tracking identifiers make it easier to relate campaign information across channels and platforms. Fixing inconsistencies at the source can prevent reporting problems later.
03
Make more of the technology you already have
Examine how your existing systems work together and where inconsistent data is limiting their value.
04
Find an ally and demonstrate the opportunity
For large organizations, Lucy's advice is straightforward: 'Don't try and boil the ocean.' Start with a business group willing to test a better approach. Demonstrate what improved visibility makes possible, then use that experience to build momentum.
05
Don't confuse what you can measure with everything that matters
Sales opportunities are an important signal of marketing performance, but they are not the whole customer journey. As measurement improves, continue exploring how earlier engagement and longer-term brand activity contribute to future demand.