How Your Marketing Team Can Make The Most Of Data – Forbes
Having been a CMO at multiple high-growth companies prior to my current role as CEO, I have refined a critical playbook to manage growth for customer acquisition and retention with use of data in our organizations. It is imperative that marketing organizations prioritize data as the core of any successful marketing acquisition or retention program for a company. I break this out into three critical elements attributes, access and visualization or what I call "data 360."
But before I dive into data 360, I want to share some thoughts on current marketing approaches that may lead to challenges with successful outcomes. Over the past several years, all the buzz has been on "MarTech." Great tools are available for email marketing, marketing automation, web analytics, digital advertising, social listening, social influence, SEO and more. The challenge is that none of these tools work well if you do not have data 360. Many marketers find they might select great tools but fall short on execution when they do not have the data needed for a successful outcome. At the core, a marketer should take an inside-out approach to get set up. Select the appropriate database, a CRM, as your single-truth data for customers and prospects. Organize this data. Identify gaps in your data. Close the gaps in your data. And now, we discuss data 360.
Data Attributes
As the first step to data 360, a marketer must identify a data schema appropriate for their marketing activities. A data schema could be the parent-child relationship of customer accounts to members all the way down to the profile data associated with an individual customer or prospect. Within this schema construct, it is important to account for metadata attributes such as geographic, demographic, marketing campaign and behavioral information and ongoing hygiene of data, such as the ability to manage duplicates, identify missing data or keep data up to date, especially the ability to append data ongoing with third-party validation. The data attributes should be managed by the marketing team no differently than the advertising campaign, identifying which data needs updates, appendices or cleansing.
Data Access
The next step for data 360 is to procure access to the database and data attributes to leverage effective distribution of the data to appropriate tools for channel management. These tools would be your email marketing/marketing automation platforms, CMS/e-commerce applications, digital advertising platforms such as AdWords, Facebook, etc., APIs for use with potential channel partners, etc. This is probably the most ignored step in the process. Many companies and marketing teams find really interesting marketing tools that promise the moon. Then, the thought is, "Wow, if I just had that tool, I could do XYZ." "XYZ" could be things like personalized targeted search by IP address with remarketing automation. Wow, that does sound cool! However, if you don't have data attributes and data access set up, none of these tools can be effective. In fact, email is the most effective to utilize with access. Marketing teams should be able to dip into highly segmented data and track results. Also, if you're interested in going multi-channel, direct to consumer, business or partners, data access is critical to make sure marketing data can be procured and properly distributed into each channel.
Data Visualization
The final step for data 360 is data visualization. So you have done all the hard work to create, manage and access the data. Now, it is time to view the data in a format that is easy to synthesize and make decisions. There are many data visualization platforms on the market. Many function the same but differ depending on how you want to manage the platform in your company. If marketing is going to manage this data, it will be critical that IT only needs to set up the ETL for data sets, and then marketing can create any report possible. At one of our businesses, we have created a waterfall of KPIs that go through the customer journey, from web traffic to clicks to conversion to renewals. Flying the plane will never be easier than when all the data is at your fingertips to synthesize.
In the end, the data 360 method enables marketing teams to be more effective not only with tactics but also with prioritization. When teams can create limitless campaigns with a full line of sight to ROI for each tactic, the priorities are very clear. In addition, monitoring the organization's marketing data further enables a team to find opportunities and further synthesize priorities.
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How Your Marketing Team Can Make The Most Of Data - Forbes