As the marketing world becomes ever more complex, your company must incorporate data analytics into its marketing strategy to understand how customers interact with your brand.
Today’s customer experience has changed drastically with the availability of digital tools. The same customer searching for a product or service can end up at the same website that another customer was searching for in an entirely different way.
Log into your Google Analytics dashboard, and you’ll see hundreds of metrics across a wide range of different reports each showing different results from a visitor's referral source, device, or operating system.
Now that customers have thousands of pathways to locate your product or service, analysing these metrics is critical for your business to stay ahead of the competition.
Whether you’re launching a new marketing campaign or optimising an existing one, leveraging business intelligence and data analytics is key to improving your marketing campaign results.
The abundance of data in today’s digital world combined with the accessibility of powerful analytics tools has made it possible for marketing teams to evaluate every aspect of their digital marketing campaigns, giving businesses a 360-degree view of the customer.
Marketers can use data and business intelligence to inform marketing decisions that better connect with customers’ needs, allowing them to gather deeper consumer insights, optimise marketing objectives, and get a better return on investment (ROI).
But for this to become a reality within your organisation, you must create a learning ecosystem driven by analytics – one that connects insights to outcomes as part of a continuous, self-improving cycle.
“Monetize information”
For companies to truly take advantage of data analytics in their marketing strategy, it must first make use of the rich amount of data publicly available on the web.
While studies show that 80 per cent of companies are already doing this, experts note that several global corporations still fail to make use of data to drive critical marketing decisions.
Doug Laney, an EM360-partnered Analyst, highlights that large firms are sending inaccurate and outdated marketing material to customers despite publicly-available data demonstrating their inaccuracy.
Mr Laney described in a LinkedIn post how Chase had failed to understand that his son was no longer a child, despite this being publicly available information and the fact his son also banks with them.
“How is it possible that one of the largest banks in the world, with whom I have had a multi-decade relationship, does not know that my only "kid" is now a grown adult living on his own? Not to mention, he banks with them too.
Maybe it's just cheaper to waste money and pollute the environment with poorly targeted mailings than create an intelligent marketing campaign.”
Mr Laney added that the banking giant has previously failed to realise that he was moving house despite all the potential benefits the bank could gain from this public data. In his book, Informatics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage, he writes:
“It seemed every local business related to moving or home buying had contacted us, except one: our own bank. Think about that for a moment. What is one of the top milestones compelling people to change banks? When they move, of course. Surprisingly, our bank never contacted us to offer any number of services to ensure we remained customers.
In fact, over a year after we moved and I sorted out all these items on my own, I received a call from my private banker at the old location who still didn’t know we had moved. By then, this bank even had subsumed the mortgage from the originator! Yet they still were unable to make the connection internally.”
Laney told EM360 that Chase Bank is just an example of the many organisations committing such a serve marketing error.
He noted that Meta’s Facebook – which earned over $113.6 billion from ad revenue last year – continues to repeat the same ad campaigns instead of using readily available data to create more effective, targetted campaigns.
“After you buy a product they advertise to you (which rarely happens anyway), they flood you with offers for the same/similar products. Some algorithm thinks I want to purchase a second pair of identical shoes? Move your ads along to a *related* product.”
“Certainly [Facebook] has that kind of data. This isn't rocket science, it's barely even data science. Just simple analytics.”
Integrate the three D’s into your marketing strategy
To fully capitalise on the potential of data analytics, companies must integrate three elements into their marketing strategy: data discovery, automated decision-making, and content distribution.
Data discovery involves collecting and combining both traditional and behavioural data to reveal valuable insights into customer preferences, interests, and needs.
However, due to the complexity of analyzing large quantities of data, companies often limit themselves to using only the most easily accessible data. Traditional CRM systems may not be equipped to handle the vast amounts of structured and unstructured data available.
To address this issue, companies can use customer data platforms (CDPs), which are more flexible and interconnected versions of customer data warehouses.
To read more about making the most of your data, visit our Data Management Page.
CDPs integrate first-party data, such as customer-supplied data, purchase history, website or app behaviour, and marketing response and engagement information, with third-party data on customer interests and shopping behaviour to improve targeted advertising.
Automated decision-making is powered by advanced analytics models that generate propensity scores for each customer or prospect. These scores indicate the likelihood of an individual responding to a specific offer or engaging with specific content.
The final step in personalisation is content distribution. An effective system uses customer and prospect scores to trigger personalised ads and landing pages, as well as distribute specific content, offers, or experiences across channels.
To successfully implement these three elements, companies must integrate their technology systems, often through APIs, to enable data to flow where it's needed and decisions to occur in real time.
Companies that successfully integrate and automate their customer and marketing data platforms can continuously test, track, refine, and optimize their strategies in real time.
This ensures that the right marketing offer is presented to the right customer and that the best leads are directed to the best salespeople.
