How set Success Bricks for Data-driven Marketing

How set Success Bricks for Data-driven Marketing

   February 23, 2016       prabhakardalvi

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Here are the things that would set you up for success in data-driven marketing.

Content: The mantra ‘content is king’ is pretty well-established now, and you don’t need me to tell you the importance of great content in marketing. Smart marketers understand that they must deliver the right content—either content that they’ve created themselves or customer-generated—at the right time and through the right channels.  But many marketers are still puzzled or have different views about how to measure the effectiveness of the content.

However, there’s one thing that can’t be argued: if you do not have the right content to engage with your prospects/customers, measuring success becomes a futile exercise. You  need to know which customer segments you’re measuring, the content you’re using to offer them, and its purpose in the purchase cycle. And if you’re using advanced analytics tools, you’ll be able to target individuals or groups within companies, see where they are in the purchase cycle, and what content they’ve consumed—and shared.

It’s worthwhile sharpening your focus. For example, it would be pointless to measure the effectiveness of top-of-funnel  awareness content to audiences who’ve already signed up for a 30-day product trial.

Analytics can also help you identify the pieces of content that do well so you can make them work harder for you. For example, if you see that a blog series has worked well you could repurpose that content as an ebook offer or as materials for a webinar. By spreading the wealth of your content you’ll have more places to measure engagement.

An eye toward details: In digital marketing it’s important to understand the data plumbing—how things are set up, the data sources, if and how the sources are integrated, what data is being generated, how it’s collected, and how effectiveness is being measured. It’s worthwhile doing a quick QA of a campaign that is about to launch so that you can see the kinds of data you’ll get back.

As a marketer, knowing how multi-touch attribution works and understanding the underpinnings behind the attribution numbers is crucial. if you do not understand how data is collected then you cannot present your case to your stakeholders in a convincing manner. You will quickly find yourself on a back foot rather on a front foot leading a discussion.

I’ve worked with marketers in the past who had to defer to their IT partners when asked basic questions about how they were measuring success. I didn’t feel very confident in their abilities as a digital marketer.

Organization Structure: With as many as 70 percent of B2B buyers using digital media to complete more than half of the decision-making process before engaging with sales[1], it’s critical that your digital teams aren’t siloed. If your web analytic, marketing automation, and paid media marketing teams report to different business units, it’s hard to create an integrated view across the customer base. Even if you provide customers with a seamless experience when they deal with your organization, how can you expect to generate insights from those customer interactions if you don’t have an end-to-end, single lens for analytics tracking.

I have seen many marketing organizations in a perpetual state of re-org, which hardly generates value for the customer, let alone provide useful marketing metrics. Constant re-orgs lead to anxiety and confusion for team members that affect the overall productivity of the marketing organization.

Culture: Does your organization have a culture to succeed in the digital world? The most important element is bias towards taking an action. There are people from two schools of thought – one would say: “Bring the insights and recommendations into the meetings for the decision making. If you don’t, a decision will be made regardless.” Their decisions will be based on prior experiences or gut feel. The other would say: “I do not trust the data,” and demands to know where, how, and when the data was collected. This camp would refrain from taking meaningful actions and wasting organizational resources.

In my career, I have learned to work in an environment that has a bias towards taking an action.  Successful marketers learn from their mistakes and channel their energy on how to do things better next time.

Divergent vs. Convergent Thinking: Marketers who will succeed in the digital age are divergent in their thinking rather than convergent. Convergent mindsets mattered when marketing activities were inefficient. Convergent mindsets focus on developing business processes, project management and following the norms. Now, as marketing technologies, such as marketing automation gain popularity, we’re on the efficiency frontier scale. What we need is a divergent mindset to measure the effectiveness of marketing – how can we increase the online engagement and customer satisfaction score, and shorten the time it take convert prospects into paying customers.

What has been your experience as a digital marketer? I’d like to hear your views on the factors that are shaping marketing teams in 2016 and beyond.

Thanks to :- Anish Jariwala Oct 28th, 2015 Next-Gen Analytics Solutions and @Sam___Hurley

Note : Any suggestion you have , please mail me on prabhakara.dalvi@gmail.com

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What is data-driven marketing mean by Tom Kaneshige

What is data-driven marketing mean by Tom Kaneshige

   February 22, 2016       prabhakardalvi

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In words tinged with somber acceptance, today's digital marketers proclaim customer data as their new master. No marketing decision shall be made without closely consulting the data-analytics tea leaves. Marketing's black art has just become quantifiable, but what does data-driven marketing really mean?

"Arguably, the most important evolution in the history of marketing is the ability to understand what data you have, what data you can get, how to organize and, ultimately, how to activate the data," says Mark Flaharty, executive vice president of advertising at SundaySky, a tech vendor leveraging customer data to create and deliver one-to-one marketing videos.

Where does data come from?

Customer data can sprout from just about anywhere. Sales transactions lie buried in a company's CRM and ERP systems. Customer interactions in marketing and customer service steal away in silos. Out on the edge, social listening, online surveys, consumer feedback and Internet of Things produce boatloads of data every day.

Then there are external data providers such as Avention, formerly OneSource, which offers business-to-business data about customers and prospects, which a company blends with internal data and feeds into an analytics engine to spit out marketing insights. Avention data helps companies better target prospect and manage the customer purchasing life-cycle.

"We're throwing fuel on the marketing-analytics fire," says Avention CTO Hank Weghorst. "All of these groups are trying to gain competitive edges by using data." Marketers are by far the fastest growing segment of Avention's business.

Paralysis by data analysis

No wonder marketers often feel overwhelmed -- even paralyzed at times -- by the sheer amount of customer data suddenly available to them. They're under enormous pressure to make data pay off with real-time decision-making. They're expected to be data experts: Three out of four consumers want retailers to gather and use personal data to improve the shopping experience, according to Monetate.

Data comes from many sources but not all contribute equally. Marketers also have the unenviable task of separating the good data from the bad data. It's a work in progress, and CIOs can help CMOs learn about the many internal and external data sources and their value to marketers. Tech vendors can assist in this difficult process, too.

"We help [CMOs] understand the quantification of the measurement metrics of the use of that data," Weghorst says. "We find out which data is truly useful and predictive, and which data is just noise so that we can drop it and potentially add other sources."

With so much data and analytics and technology thrust in the face of marketers, it might be wise to start with the end goal: What exactly do you want to achieve with all this data?

Forrester says the right data can identify customer preferences and uncover unmet customer needs. A clothing retailer, Forrester says, smartly used behavioral and location data to learn that young women, age 13 to 24, window shopped at their stores only to purchase lower-cost alternatives elsewhere. This led the retailer to create a low-cost line of clothing specifically targeting these shoppers.

Building better relationships

Customer data isn't just about sales prospecting, either. Marketers can wield data to improve the customer relationship. Airports use real-time data and recognition technology to identify passengers, bags and staff, in order to free up bottlenecks and prevent delays, Forrester says. When a flight is canceled, one airline has an app that suggests rebooking options on the spot for affected travelers.

Forrester also cites another example of creative customer service fueled by data: Mattersight draws on billions of interactions stored in a customer database, as well as predictive algorithms, to match a customer with a customer service representative who shares a similar communication style and behavioral characteristics.

By Tom Kaneshige, senior writer for CIO | Mar 31, 2015 1:42 PM PT

Data is the starting point to make all of this happen.

Note : Any suggestion you have , please mail me on prabhakara.dalvi@gmail.com

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