Why Modern Marketers Must Be Data-Driven
Spanish retailer Zara has mastered its ability to bring new designs from the drawing board to the store in a mere two to three weeks. This rapid turnaround time has emerged as a key to the brand’s success. How does Zara do this? The retailer leverages data to understand the pulse of its shoppers and uses it to come up with `fast fashion’ – something the brand has become synonymous with! Starbucks leans on data too. The coffee supremo uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve customer experiences – encashing on its 100 million transactions a week to draw reams of rich user data.
If data is the new oil, then modern marketers should be actively using this currency to make their marketing efforts more effective. Even then, there is an overabundance of data availability today, and not all of it provides terrific insights. Is it worth a marketer’s time and money to invest in data and analytics? Why do organizations need to decode these numbers?
As KPIs get redefined, it has transformed the way modern marketing works. Also, there is growing pressure on marketers to optimize every dollar spent by their team and the Return on Investment (RoI) it generates. This is where data driven marketing decisions open up new and unique possibilities to bring a paradigm shift in the way marketing has been perceived so far. Qualitative data brings the zing back into marketing and makes your marketing strategy resilient.
1. Get real insights into your customer: One of the biggest issues that marketers face is to come up with accurate customer personas, in order to target the right users, and of course, invest their money where it matters the most. Data makes this possible. It facilitates finding the right profiles and helps modern marketers go deeper into understanding their prospective customers. They can also gain better insights into customer journeys and craft appropriate messages for each stage of the funnel, thus targeting the right customer with the right message.
2. Move from prospects to brand ambassadors: Data helps marketers to step into their customer’s shoes, understand her better than she probably understands herself. With the help of predictive AI, marketers can even pre-empt the next item that’s going into your customer’s shopping cart. That’s the way smart recommendations work - while buying a sweatshirt, an e-commerce site will show you a pair of shoes that might go well with it. For marketers, data opens endless possibilities to increase the share of their customer’s wallet and turn shoppers into brand loyalists – by delivering wow customer experience to them.
3. Get a handle on the macro and micro dynamics: While data helps marketers understand their customers, it also gives them insights into the way markets are shaping and the trends to catch for an early mover advantage. Let’s say you’re an automobile marketer and you find data that points towards growing customer concern towards sustainable mobility. This will lead you to looking at Electric Vehicles (EV) as your next possible big launch.
After all, marketing is no longer only about running flamboyant campaigns. Instead, there is a growing demand that organizations understand the landscape and come up with relevant market intelligence related to their products and services. Data gives these insights – covering every detail including the products/services in demand, geographies and demographics driving this demand, and customer pain points, among others.
4. Spend where it matters: Getting a marketing budget approved becomes difficult when there are no tangible metrics to prove the success of your last campaign. Also, there is no point in putting your monies into a black hole, where there are no insights into how your advertising channel of choice – be it digital banners, Facebook ads, or print and television advertisements – are performing. Deep learning-powered data intelligence can give you incisive knowledge of how your media mix is working and on non-performing channels. This gives you the flexibility to review and take a relook at your media spends and re-allocate your budget to get maximum RoI even when a campaign is still live.
5. Use marketing automation to drive effectiveness: As complexities and competition grows in both B2B and B2C marketing, data is emerging as a goldmine that cannot be ignored. However, this data is of no use to marketers if they can’t gain the right insights from these numbers at the right time. It’s critical to find ways to sift through this data to come up with meaningful insights. Automation and modern tools like PredicitiVu’s dynamic marketing optimizer are the way forward for modern marketers in order to expedite the use of data, remove the chaff from the grain, get real time updates, and integrate this data with tools that will give them a unified view on managing their campaigns.
While 97% of executives believe analytics are crucial to a company’s success, what is surprising is that only 11% believe that it has contributed to their organization’s growth as per Forbes Insights. This is because reading, using, and implementing the right data often poses a roadblock for organizations. It’s time marketers join the elite 11% who use analytics for growth.
The author is Lloyd Mathias, Business Strategist and former Marketing Head of HP Asia Pacific
