How marketing leaders can optimize the use of data to deliver real business value
The digital revolution has unleashed a cascade of data, meaning marketers have access to higher quantities of consumer information than ever. Today, teams are able to construct customer models to analyze consumer lifestyles and habits, and use real-time insights to create and monetize powerful, personalized, and contextualized experiences.
But does access to masses of data truly unlock valuable insight, or ‘moments’ of truth? For many marketers the sheer volume of data introduces new levels of complexity. The modern customer journey spans multiple digital and traditional channels, including new and emerging social media platforms. According to Domo’s latest ‘Data Never Sleeps’ report, every minute 55,140 photos are shared on Instagram, and over 4,500,000 videos are viewed on YouTube.
The result is a complex environment that makes it increasingly hard for marketers to gain a thorough, holistic understanding of customer behaviors. Domo’s latest IDC research shows marketers are fully aware of the detrimental ROI impact that comes when decision-making doesn’t involve data, and acknowledge the need for change. Nearly 70 percent say that improving customer targeting outcomes is extremely important. While 58 percent see improving performance tracking outcomes as critical.
Read More: Hubspot Diamond Partners B2B Marketing Lab and MPULL Sign Strategic Partnership to Establish Closer
There is no denying that data is a goldmine that presents a pivot-point moment for marketing leaders. Companies that invest in data driven decision-making tools and practices are those that reap the rewards. These ‘digital leaders’ are able to react at pace (and accurately) to compete with the dynamic market conditions. They also report significantly lower levels of challenge across key factors such as, data fragmentation, visibility across business processes, organizational complexity and poor decision culture.
Yet, despite the clear business advantage, 74 percent of companies have still not fully embraced digitization of business processes, products, and services, and only 4 percent are using data tools to help them make critical business decisions. So how can marketers optimize the use of marketing insights, assets and campaigns to align with customer expectations?
Implement end-to-end visibility to drive adaptability and customer loyalty
End-to-end visibility is a crucial enabler of customer loyalty – and truly sustainable ROI from marketing investments. In order to support the business models of the future, organizations must have a holistic view of marketing activities and their effectiveness, and all in real-time.
The aim here is to develop a process that empowers continuous and linked improvements between customer insights and campaign performance as they happen. Having one system in place means that marketing departments can collaborate better and gather data from any digital or traditional channel or venue that customers might be exposed to throughout their journeys.
Read Also: One North brings AI to professional services content marketing
Turn insights into comprehensive customer targeting and segmentation
Identifying and targeting the most profitable and strategically important customer segments is now becoming much more thorough thanks to digital customer engagement models. Organizations must push beyond traditional profiling and look to also include information about current and future customer value, customer life-cycle progression and observed customer behaviors across interaction channels and venues.
These changes are already happening, nearly 50 percent of organizations are using data systematically for audience segmentation – allowing businesses to refine who they target and achieve greater levels of personalization. Increasing the use of data will enable businesses to make more efficient allocation of sales and promotion sources and will strengthen customer empathy and alignment.
Make use of Artificial Intelligence to take your performance tracking to the next level
Managing marketing performance is the overarching method for improving ROI and the effectiveness of marketing. In order to successfully evaluate performance, marketing functions must create a suitable content management system that serves all communication channels with consistently applied, well-defined content tags to ensure that the results are meeting the expectations of both sales and marketing.
To reduce costs across digital asset creation and content management, this unified system should be AI-enabled. Characterization, tagging, and selection of textual and visual digital assets should be powered by machine learning and overseen by creative design and editorial content guidelines. By harnessing technology, marketing teams can reduce time to market by accelerating the creative processes.
Also Read: Why One-to-One Messaging is the Future of Conversational Marketing
Harness the power of data to accelerate time to value
Grasping the highest share of the market depends on your organization’s ability to continuously adapt to the real-time needs of its ecosystem – to deliver personalized products, services, and experiences to customers.
Although there are clearly weak areas across key marketing functions, there is also a strong appetite and motivation to improve for many businesses. Becoming a digitally-savvy marketing department requires a seamless integrated platform that surfaces insights relating to customer interactions across every single touch-point.
For today’s marketing leaders to unlock ‘moments of truth’ in marketing processes, they must implement a fit-for-purpose decision making which is powered by data, built on end-to-end visibility, and driven by new technologies.
For more such updates follow us on Google News TalkCMO News.
