Data shortfalls, data insufficiencies, data stacks. All of these can give marketers the wrong idea about the customer with whom they want to engage, and can give consumers the wrong idea about marketers. Here are three tips to create and improve data driven marketing strategies.
Choose the right data
“The volume of information is growing rapidly, while opportunities to expand insights by combining data are accelerating. Bigger and better data give companies both 3600 and granular views of their business environment. The ability to see what was previously invisible improves results, customer experiences, and refines your data driven strategy,” said Anil Kaul, Co-Founder & CEO, AbsolutData. “Choosing the right data would mean:
• Source data creatively – Companies can encourage a more comprehensive look at their internal data, may be sitting on their systems, by being specific about the business problems and opportunities they need to address. Considering that marketing is very dynamic in nature, marketers need to get creative about the potential of external and new sources of data. Social media generates terabytes of nontraditional, unstructured data in the form of conversations, photos, and video. streams of data flowing in from sensors, monitored processes, and external sources ranging from local demographics to weather forecasts, all what is relevant can be added to the data sets.
• Get the necessary IT support and technology upgradation – Existing IT architectures may prevent the integration of siloed information, and managing unstructured data often remains beyond traditional IT capabilities. However, the fastest way out could be quickly identifying and integrating the most important data for use, developing a strong internal technical architecture and expertise in analytics and then fill in with the missing data sets.”
Build models that predict and optimize business outcomes
“Data is of utmost importance, but competitive advantage arises from building analytical or advanced statistical models which can help marketers to predict and optimize outcomes. To make your data- driven marketing strategy successful, identify an opportunity and determine how the model can yield better performance- probably help you with designing targeted campaigns, ROI driven promotions etc. Since its about data, the risk- taking marketers can try and play around a bit with data modelling,” said Kaul.
Transform your company’s capabilities
“You have your data driven marketing strategy in place. You have all the systems, processes and technology at your disposal, but the only place you may fail at the whole project is when you over estimate on your companies’ capabilities. Also, marketers often don’t understand or trust big data-based models and, consequently, don’t use them. Such problems often arise because of a mismatch between an organization’s existing culture and capabilities and emerging tactics to exploit analytics successfully,” said Kaul. “To succeed, marketers need to understand the new approaches of capitalizing their data, align them with decision making, build technology and provide a clear blueprint for realizing business goals. Organizations will need to develop business relevant analytics system, embed analytics into simple tools and develop capabilities to exploit big data.”
