While data and analytics unlock actionable insights, organizations are often met with challenges in integrating and utilizing that data
With industries worldwide reeling under the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, businesses have started making changes to their communications strategies and also how they provide services to consumers. Digital channels have now become the predominant way of interaction for both the customer and the marketer.
Meanwhile, budgets are continually changing, and every dollar counts. This creates complex challenges for organizations. How can they keep up with the increasing customer demands, changing landscape, and dynamics?
An informed decision can only be made with access to data and insight into how the customers perceive each program, activity, piece of content, and campaign and how it impacts the bottom line, and business ROI.
Barriers to Effective Data Analytics
Marketers today have a big hand in driving business growth and success. CMOs believe enterprises have increasingly started shifting their focus to marketing-led growth significantly in the past few years.
But, there are significant barriers to growth that stop marketers from meeting their mandate, and the on top of the list is data mismanagement. Sometimes factors such as low-quality data and issues with data integration are the culprit.
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Marketing leaders say a lack of real-time insight, a united view of the performance, and an understanding of the customer along with misaligned teams is major hindrances too. Marketers today are expected to do more with limited resources – and they need to tackle data challenges to get there.
Data-driven Marketing Decisions
It is clear that marketing leaders see immense value in data and analytics capabilities and understand the need for prioritizing it in their decision-making process. The value of customer data never changes, but the real challenge lies in how the marketers use it.
The biggest challenge is understanding how to extract customer intelligence out of the enormous volume of data at hand and use it coherently and swiftly over the different marketing channels.
The answer to this conundrum lies in the close-knit collaboration between Marketing and IT. The CMO and the CIO need to work together to derive the actual value of data in marketing.
Data Integration Challenges
Marketing attribution is more crucial than ever. The number of channels to reach customers has increased remarkably. There is the web, email, mobile, social media, surveys, social, cross-channel strategies, etc., to choose from.
But, the resulting data is remarkably complex. It isn’t easy to gain a holistic view of all the marketing data with the different formats and delivery platforms.
It is important to analyze which marketing channels drive revenue for the company, and realizing the exact value of all the marketing efforts in the channels is key. Hence, at the beginning of each year, most CMOs carefully decide which channels deserve their efforts, time, and budgets.
Customers leave traces all the time on all the different channels. This intelligence allows the marketing budget to be optimized in the smartest way possible. But it presents a number of challenges at the same time.
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They include data accuracy and unifying data from different sources. This results in marketers failing to gain actionable insight in a timely and impactful manner.
For a data-driven organizational culture that results in a clear measurement strategy and marketing growth, CMOs need to align their people, technology, processes, customers’ needs, and growth priorities. Implementing this process can be cumbersome but now organizations have more tools at their fingertips.
With these goals in mind, marketing leaders can ready themselves and their organization for success in an industry where change is the only constant.
