Building your roadmap for data-driven marketing

NEIL DAVEY
EditorMyCustomer.com

While the attraction of data-driven marketing isn’t in doubt, the challenge confronting businesses can be daunting.

According to the Q1 2014 Gleanster Research customer experience survey, about eight out of ten senior marketers believe their organisation could be doing a better job of using customer data to inform customer acquisition and retention strategies.

But with data-driven marketing involving so many working parts, the end goal can appear unobtainable.

To demonstrate the scale of the project, Adam Sharp, co-founder of CleverTouch and member of IDM’s Executive Council, highlights just some of the main characteristics of a data-driven organisation:

• They have a handle on their customers and prospect data and know the health of it.
• They have it in the one place (a data warehouse) that is linked to both their marketing automation and their CRM. At a minimum their CRM and marketing automation are linked and data is flowing between them.
• They look at client and prospect data not just titles, company size and location, but by profile, interest and degree of engagement – prospect, suspect, customer, advocate.
• They have moved away from ROI (which is reverse engineering their contribution) and are able to measure marketing activity and customer and prospect behaviours in such a way as to forecast the future impact on the business. 
• They have removed silos from within the organisation.
• They have enhanced workflows and realigned incentives to encourage data sharing.

It is therefore unsurprising that the task can appear daunting.

However, organisations must remember that data-driven marketing isn’t so much a destination as it is a transformational journey.  

So with this in mind, what are the key steps that organisations need to take on this journey towards being a data-driven organisation?

Implement an organisation-wide data strategy

Marketers have been making significant progress with the status of their data, and statistics from the Teradata 2015 Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey indicate that today data-driven marketing is either embedded or strategic for 78% of marketers – a large increase from only a year ago, when an ad hoc approach prevailed.

However, to be truly data-driven, data must be shared between business units, and for this to be successful, data needs to be managed consistently across the entire business. For this reason, businesses need to ensure that a strategic approach to data is adopted organisation-wide.

“An overall data strategy is vital and must be understood, adopted and rolled out across the business,” notes Daniel Telling, commercial director at Occam. “This needs to be reviewed on a consistent basis to ensure that all opportunities to capture useful and relevant information are exploited.”

Key points that need to be addressed include achieving consistency in how data is collected, catalogued, stored and used.

A data governance structure also needs to be established. Former D&B global chief data, insight and analytic officer Paul Ballew, recommends: “Invest the time upfront to bring your data and third party assets together in a systematic way, such as establishing a common entity identifier, nomenclature and taxonomy.”

Restructure the organisation

For data-driven marketing to become a reality, different business units and departments must be able to collaborate and share data. And as well as demanding that there is consistency in data management, this also means that organisations silos need to be broken down, both within the marketing department and throughout the entire business.

Indeed, structural silos represent a significant obstacle that prevents the successful sharing of data and inter-company collaboration. The Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey, for instance, indicates that internal silos prevent 42% of marketers from having such a full and consistent view of their customers.

In particular, silos must be broken down between IT and marketing. IT is a vital partner for the marketing department, playing a crucial role in connecting the touchpoints throughout the business, and thereby supporting data collection and integration. Survey findings indicate that over three-quarters of marketers view the development of a strategic partnership with IT as a priority.

“In terms of data-driven marketing, IT and marketing and sales work together best when silos are broken down at all levels and they are free to operate collegiately to adopt new technologies,” agrees Telling.

Create a cross-functional team

To support collaboration and break down silos, organisations should also develop a cross-functional team, including marketers and IT.

Katharine Hulls, VP marketing at Celebrus Technologies, notes: “Data and technology are just the start. To drive value from these investments requires the right skill-sets to analyse the data to deliver insight and drive action. To be truly successful it is important to create a cross-functional team, including marketers, analysts and IT as each brings their own skills, perspectives and experiences to deliver the best results.

“Forrester Research estimates that over 45% of Big Data deployments are for marketing – but that doesn’t mean that marketing should own marketing data and technology single-handedly: they must also recognise the skills IT brings to big data technology choices and deployment. It is therefore important for the CMO and CIO to work together, leverage different areas of expertise, pool resources and ensure the robust, scalable platforms are in place to deliver long-term value.”

Integrate data

Marketers need to create a single, complete, actionable and flexible view of their customers and prospects. However, over time, most enterprises have invested in numerous marketing technologies that specialises in different disciplines, leading to siloed data and a lack of visibility of prospect behaviour, and a lack of a holistic understanding of customers.

Telling says: “There are of course some physical barriers. With complex infrastructures, and the ballooning amount of interaction points businesses have with customers, it can be difficult to create a single point of truth. For years, organisations have been trying to create the single customer view so that interactions can be personal and informed for the benefit of both business and customer.”

To address this, enterprises will inevitably need to integrate customer data from disparate systems. Ian Michiels, principal & CEO at Gleanster Research, believes there are two avenues that organisations can take.

“Consider layering in a centralised platform that can pull in available customer data and unify it against individual customer records (and keep existing legacy technologies). Or consider replacing legacy tools with a multichannel platform that can centralise and simplify access to customer data that can be used in customer communications, inform customer channel preferences, and orchestrate a consistent customer experience.”

The Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey indicates that businesses are making progress with this challenge, with 43% of executives reporting they have achieved fully integrated data across teams, compared with only 18% in 2013.

Additionally, Michiels recommends augmenting customer data records with third-party data, highlighting that top-performing businesses are twice as likely as laggards to purchase additional data on existing customers from third-party providers. 

He notes: “Additional data attributes of existing customer data may provide insight into what your customers really look like so you can focus customer acquisition efforts toward more relevant target audiences. Things like household income, marital status, number of children, and other key attributes may not exist internally from existing customer interactions but can be acquired with reasonable accuracy, making it worthwhile for informing marketing spend.”

Leverage analytics

With the data integrated and augmented, businesses can utilise analytics to deliver actionable insights and guide decision-makers. And it is not just marketers that can benefit from this rigorous exercise – departments ranging from sales and customer service, to finance and purchasing, can all profit from greater insight into prospects and customers.

Hulls notes: “To date, relatively few organisations have extended their use of analytics beyond web analytics into areas such as journey mapping, golden pathing and affinities analysis. Those companies that have pushed on with analytics are reaping the rewards: research suggests that almost three quarters (71%) have achieved better customer targeting, 58% improved conversion, 51% improved marketing personalisation and 51% improved customer experience.

“Analytics tools provide marketers with the chance to find new insight, including individual customer journey analytics and marketing attribution. To make the most of these tools, marketers need to get stuck in; ask questions of the data and gain real confidence in the depth of customer insight now available.”

To drive results, Michiels recommends identifying high-priority customer personas (according to profitability or other goals), and then focusing analytics on those core personas and optimising for 3-5 of them.

Final points

Undertaking a project of such enormity can be daunting for the organisation, and can also be unsettling for the staff. It is important that businesses manage the change appropriately.

“One major obstacle across every organisation is the fear of change,” says Telling. “Organisations need fearless, brave people who are prepared to instigate the first steps. They may already exist in an organisation but are just not getting heard, or it may be down to you to discover them.”

He adds: “Businesses need to ensure that they are investing in people (training, skills and development), planning (strategy, comms and brand), and that the processes required to apply this to the marketing programme are in place to drive value across the entire organisation.”

“Make sure you have considered your current marketing model, how it will change and what the target operating model should be. For example, this can be change in terms of people and processes. Make changes across the entire organisation’s focus, and involve different parts of the business, communicating with them as much as possible. Access to the right data and technology is a great start, but useless without the ability to draw true value and insights from them.”