Data: The Most Powerful Marketing Tool or a Marketer's Worst Nightmare
Every marketing professional is working from the data they gather, as has always been the case. The difference today is the huge amount of information we are able to gather everyday, every minute. Big Data brings rivers of information, the question is, are we doing a good job?
Is all Data we collect necessary?
The challenge today is how to get the information we need to achieve a specific set of goals derived from our marketing strategy. Today we pride ourselves on the amount of Data we own, we fill our hard drives with gigas worth of information the question is then: why aren’t we reaching our marketing objectives?
Before we start collecting Data from the company and from external sources we have to first establish what is our goal and what information we need to reach it. Then we start by gathering to all information we already have from within the company and then be clear on what we need to look for outside.
Internal information may come from multiple sources:
- CRM/ERP
- Call Center
- Web Traffic
- Surveys
- Communities, Social Media
Whatever information we can’t find in house, we may have to pay for from firms that specialise in Data gathering, such as Experia or Axiom or maybe use platforms such as Oracle’s Blue Kai.
To correctly establish our data gathering strategy we have to consider:
Data Quality. How to separate the noise from valuable information.
Data Integration. How we will integrate our own information with what we get from outside sources.
We can gather all the information we want, but for it to really be useful it must show insights an be applicable. That is, it must be essential to reach a specific objective.
Information should help us:
1.- Know customer profile. Who uses our service or buys our product. Understanding who our audience is helps us design highly effective strategies allowing us to get new profiled customers.
2.- Personalised experiences. Market today wants personalised content, they have dedicated many hours sharing information about who they are and what they do, they now want in return communication to be more personal. If they are returning clients they don’t want to hear about something they already bought, they want to know about something that will compliment and enrich their past purchase.
3.- Improve content. With information gathered we gan generate useful content. Content should add value to the customer. If we identify content with better engagement results than other we can generate more similar content, if que know what has more downloads we can concentrate in producing more content like that. If we know what audiences are looking for we can deliver what they need.
4.- Predictive Analysis. Being able to establish an historic profile we can predict what customers may need in the future, we can better prepare for it.
5.-Be more efficient in advertising buying and selling through Programmatic.
Our competitive advantage is not the amount of information we can gather, nor our capacity to save it and display it.
The true empowering advantage is our capacity to intelligently use the precise information needed to achieve a specific marketing goal.
Data must tell us who our clients are, how are they investing their time and what products or services are they engaging with. Our advantage is then how we understand the market better and how can we create content and experiences that meet their needs.