Marketing organizations want to be more data-driven. As a result, they use about 16 different technology platforms on average, but only a few organizations get the full value of their investment.
Marketers must learn how to use analytics to capture at least five growth opportunities:
- Acquisition of more valuable customers
- Acquisition of customers who will buy more from you
- Acquisition of customers who will buy more of your valuable products/services
- Retain valuable customers
- Identify the marketing activities that have the greatest impact on accelerating and retaining customers
Move these four sources of analysis to the top of the list
- Collect quality data
Data is the basic ingredient for any analysis. Many organizations are still challenged by the large quantity and problematic quality of the data:
- According to Domo, more than 2.5 million bytes of data are created every day. And it is estimated that 1.7 MB of data per second will be created for each person on Earth by 2020.
- According to the Experian 2018 Data Management Benchmark report, “Respondents in the U.S. find an average of 33% of customer and prospect data somewhat inaccurate, compared to 28% a few years earlier.” This is not a technological problem. This is a human problem. Almost half of the quality problems are related to human error.
Improve your ability to collect quality data with…
- Blocking and attack base
- A solid data management strategy
- Good data management processes
- Enter data from a variety of different sources
As traditional customer data sources continue to dominate, companies are increasingly turning to new data sources, including POS data, transaction data, and research data. Make sure your organization has an inventory of the data so you know what data you have, where it is, how often it is updated and who is responsible for it.
- Recruit, train and retain talent
You need the right people to translate the data into practical insights. Many people may have technical training in mathematics, but they may not have the ability to know what data is important and the business skills that help them see the connection between analysis and business.
- Look for tools to support predictive models
There are two different tools with which marketing organizations need to be smart for analysis: one is the set of tools to perform the calculations; the other is a set of models that help you understand the impact of an action.
- Predictive analytics software can enable your company to see the future. Choosing a tool is like buying a bicycle: if you’re a beginner, start with a bicycle for beginners – without a lot of gears, durable tires, and so on. Plan to upgrade to something more specialized, refined, and complicated as you gain experience.
- Each marketing organization must have a library of customer-centric models to understand and anticipate customer behavior and determine when customers are at risk. Create templates for all stages of the customer lifecycle. The purchase, allocation, and combination of customer structure and vulnerability patterns must be in your library. Update your models as new data becomes available. Update each model at least once a year.
There is no time
Analytics and martech are essential tools for marketing. It is essential to be an agile, efficient, and customer-oriented organization. Together, analytics and martech pave the way for marketing to act as a strategic member of the organization, to manage and measure marketing performance, and to facilitate customer, market and product decisions.