With Great Data Comes Great Responsibility
Post-pandemic marketing is all about speed and dexterity. Now that customers are rewired for digital, marketing and businesses must reform as well. The organisational and technological silos within an organisation need to be broken down with an effective data-driven operational model that addresses how data is handled throughout organisational operations, from data gathering to data exchange and its use. It’s no longer enough to simply acquire a tech stack to drive results; it must also be matched with a sufficient range of big data to fuel its success, the right use cases to produce results, and an ingenious approach to human enablement. This is where many businesses fail to recalibrate from outdated systems to more modern technology or to add to current systems. Only those businesses that are able to harness and capture data shifts with the necessary granularity and agility will be able to drive strategic, profitable and sustainable growth in the new normal.
More importantly, marketing now has the chance to take the lead in this conversation and drive the organisation's overall growth and innovation agenda. However, reports suggest that instead of leveraging data to better target customers and tailor messages, many marketers are still stuck with the basics‒email, name, location and demographics‒when it comes to using big data to personalise their marketing communications. One reason for this could be because customer behaviour is evolving so fast that they are unable to trust historical data and models of their existing DDOMs. However, there are some marketers who are thinking ahead of the curve and embracing precision marketing for the gift it is.
Precision-marketing models are trained to recognise and draw inferences from behavioural patterns. And as many marketers are realising, the indicators for the new opportunities they face are not contained within their own data. Marketers today need to dig deep and wide into data from a variety of sources to hone their insights, including third-party analytics on their company, customers, and competitors to supplement their internal customer data, behavioural patterns, and location-based insights. Take personalisation, for example. According to research by market research firm Invespcro, marketing firms that exceed their revenue goals apply personalisation methods 83 per cent of the time. The report also revealed that businesses that use data-driven personalisation methods reported between five and eight times ROI on their marketing budgets. Price optimisation is another key benefit of using data. Analysing market data, sales history, and company accounts can reveal the optimal pricing to achieve maximum profit.
Data can also help businesses produce more insightful competitive analysis. Marketers can assess the power of various value propositions and determine which components resonate with certain client segments by comparing third-party assortment, sales, and promotional data to their own figures, for example. They can then deliver messages, information, and offers that are specifically suited to these groups. Thanks to rich data it's now possible, more than ever before, to get an in-depth overview of target audience characteristics and profile, effectively reducing ad spend on wasted clicks. Research conducted byMcKinseyalsofound organisations that use data to make marketing decisions are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times more likely to retain them, and 19 times more likely to be profitable.
A more agile operating model is a key element in this, and it also requires developing technology capabilities that learn at scale. Marketers should steadily push the limits by using artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor campaigns and interrogate responses at a detailed level. AI-enabled monitoring can do this in minutes, sometimes seconds and these analytics can then be fed directly into the campaign’s targeting logic. A robust AI engine is a crucial element in a broader data-driven marketing programme that can help a business significantly increase its rate of testing and deliver much more actionable and conclusive insights. Marketing automation further enables those insights to be utilised to make marketing efforts more effective.
In a world of screens and an endless stream of content, it has never been harder to capture and maintain a customer’s attention. Collecting, organising, and harnessing data gives marketers evidence of what’s working, and what isn’t and often can even spark entirely new ideas. If you haven’t already, the time to create a strategy for harnessing the power of your data, is NOW.
The author is the Global Head of Marketing Demand Centre of Tata Consulting Services, Amit leads MarTech strategy and operations to support the business and marketing objectives.
.png)
