Marketing is dynamic and hectic in nature – data volumes continue to multiply, customer preferences shift, and competition always keeps you on your toes. With all of these factors working at a fast pace, marketers must keep up by having a data driven marketing strategy in place. But executing and managing a strategy may not be a cake walk. Here are six challenges facing brands.

by Kristina Knight

Not asking the right questions

“For executing a strategy, you need to first ask the right questions – how can you drive your business forward if you don’t know which questions to ask and if they are relevant to your problem? The key to asking the right questions is knowing you marketing goals and identifying your KPIs. The bottom line is: even the best quality data won’t matter unless you know what purpose to use it for,” said Anil Kaul, Co-Founder & CEO, AbsolutData.

Finding high quality and promising data

“When you have a business, it’ s only natural that you will generate terabytes of data every day. Bad data creates bad results, it’s as simple as that. Admittedly, most data requires some cleaning (removing misleading records and transforming the data to a useable form, for a start). But it does not need to be pure, pristine data; do the best you can with what is available. However, don’t stop with what’s available in your silo or department; enable the sharing of relevant data from the whole organization. This will ultimately give you better results,” said Kaul.

Working with real-time data

“Organizations are still challenged with leveraging real time data which can put them off the radar. The organizations may not be technologically equipped or have skilled marketers to track and extract maximum utility from the real time changes. Not being able to keep up with the real time data changes can cost marketers a big chunk of customers, failing to deliver a customer driven strategy and engagement,” said Kaul.

Breaking down silos

“The data in marketing is often fragmented. It’s often messy, not unified and sifting through to find what exactly you need is never easy. Your marketing data flows in from many channels and sources but it’s stored in different places. This data is stored by various departments and you get multiple data sets or the silos. To get a holistic view of your data, derive the best insights from all the data that is available, you need to break down these silos and have all the data filtered and harmonized at one place,” said Kaul.

Lack of Customer-centric culture

“Organizations need to fully embrace a culture where customers are given the priority and all the efforts are directed towards creating satisfying experiences for the customers. Often than not, organizations may fail to stick to this goal and be resistant towards any change or become unwilling to invest time, money and talent in such strategies,” said Kaul.

Deriving the right insight

“Data is of no use if you can’t extract the right insight. Even your well-planned strategy won’t work of you can get the right action driven insights. Extracting the right insight now largely depends upon your clarity of goals, clean data and a good tech stack. The better technology you deploy, the better you can extract useful insights. But somehow organizations face a challenge to keep up with the technology stacks owing to rapid technology changes. This impacts the quality of insights and actions you take viz-a vis your better off competitor,” said Kaul.