Data-Driven Marketing Separates Winners from Losers, Marketing & Advertising News, ET BrandEquity

Some of the old Indian stories include: A vagrant, sitting under a tree and seeking alms from strangers for his daily survival, meets a monk who asks him to dig in the place where he has been sitting for several years. The perplexed man takes the saint's advice seriously and investigates. Within minutes, he unearths a treasure of enormous value that has likely been buried for many years. This is a very common saying, said and passed down over the years to encourage spiritually inclined people to look within to find their God, divinity, and perhaps enlightenment. Ta. Today, modern data and analytics monks are telling businesses, governments, and people around the world exactly what the monks told the tramps to look for the data treasures buried in their organizations. . As we near the middle of the third decade of the 21st century, the value of data is a concept being discussed everywhere. The conventional wisdom that “data is the new oil” is primarily leveraged by sectors such as manufacturing, e-commerce, fintech, healthcare, and logistics. Companies in these industries strengthen sales, save on wasteful spending, and make their businesses more robust and resilient. Governments have also used data to make welfare measures and other services more accessible and effective.

Meanwhile, the marketing field, with the exception of a few pioneers, is grappling with its own challenges, exacerbated by the complexities of the digital age, including data overload, complex technologies (martech, adtech, demand-side platforms, supply-side), etc. is. – platforms), an influx of acronyms, jargon, and trends. Despite this confusion, some enthusiasts are looking to data-driven insights rather than gut-based decisions to navigate the situation. While these efforts are laudable, they are typically limited to specific campaigns, ad hoc deployments, or at best within verticals or silos. A comprehensive, domain-wide, data-driven marketing approach akin to “Marketing-Skynet” is yet to emerge.

Whether your company is a large company with seemingly unlimited access to resources (financial, technology, talent) or a small company, investing in building the ecosystem necessary for data-driven marketing can help you do more. You can do many things.

Before delving into data-driven marketing, it's important to understand the situation. Implementing a data-driven strategy is more than just adopting new technology. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Building an integrated data-driven marketing system is similar to creating a product, similar to designing a car. This includes leveraging off-the-shelf components, adapting existing components, and developing new elements. Each piece must be shaped to a desired outcome, emphasizing the importance of a clear vision for success.

“End state” planning requires expertise across multiple disciplines at the intersection of data, measurement, engineering, analytics, modeling, marketing, media, communications, and technology. It is equally important to understand the business domain, organizational systems and processes. Ideally, a project leader with diverse skills and experience would spearhead the initiative, but finding people with such diverse experience can be difficult. Or a cross-functional team led by someone who values ​​the power of data can fill the gap. Maintaining central authority and ownership within an organization, whether led by an individual or a team, is essential to maintaining focus and preventing dilution of efforts.

Because every business is unique, there is still no clear roadmap for achieving integrated, data-driven marketing. Therefore, here are some guidelines that can serve as your north star when human resources are considered.

Measuring what really matters: customer journey mapping

The customer must be at the center of everything. To do that, you need to know what your customers are experiencing. Understanding their journey and monitoring key milestones is an important step. The customer journey in today's digital environment is complex and blends online and offline interactions. Effective measurement requires offline tracking and online data to work together to break down data silos. The goal is to leverage first-party data to track users from lead to lead to customer. Complexity varies by business process, but a centralized measurement system ensures collaboration across platforms such as paid media and email.

Optimize for entities rather than individuals

Since the essence is mapping the customer journey, it becomes imperative that silos within the organization are not prioritized. Literally speaking, if you need to find out “local requirements”, i.e. how a particular part or several parts of the whole journey works, you are not allowed to interfere with the organization-wide tracking system . Specifically, you cannot tag “internal links” in a way that overrides the user's original identifier. For Google Analytics enthusiasts, using her UTM tags for internal links is taboo and should be given the harshest punishment.

Additionally, you should create standard operating procedures for all required naming conventions for all metrics and dimensions throughout the journey. It's safe to say that these steps should become law and be imposed across the organization as part of the implementation process. These practices provide a variety of benefits. Streamline data collection, create data that's useful for analysis, and save yourself tons of days (or weeks) of cleaning, shaping, and drudgery for years to come.

Aiming to build a flexible system

An integrated data-driven marketing system necessarily incorporates multiple subsystems and tools. Encounters with walled gardens like Google and Facebook are inevitable. Disparate data sources often require intermediate solutions for communication, but flexibility is essential to avoid tying systems to specific tools. Major cloud services offer a variety of technologies that can adapt to different needs, especially if you're not starting from scratch, allowing for multi-cloud setups. Considering the evolving landscape of technology, digital, data and privacy, a flexible and adaptable system consisting of changeable elements allows rapid changes to suit changing scenarios.

Thinking long term: The value of customer relationships

Mapping the customer journey reveals the economic value of the company-customer relationship, beyond lifetime value, including referrals, recommendations, endorsements, feedback, and suggestions. Understanding the value of this relationship can help you reprioritize your marketing channels. For example, social media may not help with traditional customer acquisition, but it can be great at generating recommendations and recommendations. This change in focus allows for realistic goal setting and strategy adjustments.

Leverage analytics

Currently, data and artificial intelligence/machine learning are inseparable terms. Analysis includes both data modeling and traditional statistical methods. Experimentation and testing are essential to data-driven marketing, and you need to understand statistical techniques to derive meaningful insights. Many tools provide statistical rigor, but understanding these techniques can be useful for analysis outside of tool-driven processes. For example, when analyzing brand campaign data, statistical methods can identify significant differences in user behavior and provide actionable insights. Machine learning algorithms are essential for leveraging vast datasets and enabling custom audience building and visit scoring tasks. Analytics also plays a key role in addressing attribution and incrementality challenges.

Applications of behavioral science: Personalizing communication

Once actionable data and insights are available, the moment of truth is when they are deployed in the real world. Customization means creating specific messaging for specific audiences (based on user behavior, lifecycle stage, personality traits, etc., using ML clustering algorithms) . Running a Kannada creative against her IP address in Bengaluru is not called running a customized campaign. Borrowing approaches from the fields of behavioral science and persuasion is very likely to give your campaign a boost. You can consider various techniques, such as using principles such as authority, scarcity, loss aversion, and similarity. You need to test and learn to determine what works for your business in which scenarios. Be mindful of ethics when using these approaches.

Quick wins, quick failures, and iterations

Let's stop joking. Building an integrated, data-driven marketing system takes time. Managers and management cannot wait for completion and make profits. Plan for quick success and prioritize the low-hanging fruit from the beginning. Once you have reliable basic data, you can reap early benefits by feeding signals into algorithms like the “SMART” campaign option from major advertising players. Proceed with caution when using these black box systems and gradually increase your budget to control costs. Trust in your data grows over time, opening up more opportunities. Recognize that a perfect system is unattainable. We must evolve with the changing times. Data-driven marketing levels the playing field for businesses of all sizes. In a competitive environment, leveraging data well and executing with integrity can be the difference between winners and losers.