10 Things We Know about the Future of Data-Driven Marketing
By Heike Young
It’s true: 95% of the planet’s data was generated in last 5 years.
And where does all this data come from?
More like — where doesn’t data come from?
For starters, the average American spends 162 minutes per day on their phones. Nearly half that time (49%) is spent either playing games or scrolling through Facebook. And the number of global internet users shows no signs of stopping:
With all these online interactions, we as marketers are more focused than ever on digital (vs. traditional) marketing methods. Social, mobile, and big data are converging, and we’re in a time of serious transition within our industry.
Gartner’s Research Director Marty Kihn talked about these data-centric topics and problems in a recent session at Salesforce Connections. Here are ten takeaways from this talk.
“If something fits in Excel, it’s not a big data project.” — Marty Kihn, Gartner
- Kihn mentioned Gartner’s prediction in 2012 that the CMO would spend more than the CIO on technology by 2017 — and confirmed that we’re on track. It’s only two years away, but we’re definitely on track.
- With dynamic ads, marketers can go beyond types of people to the individual person. We won’t see just four customized landing pages; we’ll see thousands.
- Every company will start making decisions more like Netflix. Which show will be the next Orange is the New Black? The data already knows. Netflix is the perfect example of a company that makes customer data actionable and useful. In fact, Netflix greenlights new movie and series projects based on customer data. The company has massive amounts of data on viewing habits of its customers, and thus chooses projects based on the likelihood that real viewers would actually watch them. Netflix can use viewing data on actors, type of programming, genre, and more.
- Customized news content will comprise the whole page, not a sidebar. Another example of a company successfully using data benefit is the New York Times. If you head to NYT.com, you’ll probably see a sidebar of stories recommended for you, or people like you. But Kihn asked, “Why couldn’t the whole front page be personalized?” Some sites are already like that, and it’s only a matter of time before every newspaper homepage is our homepage.
- Data will continue to cause great anxiety for marketers. Kihn noted that data is the #1 area of stress and anxiety for today’s digital marketers. Integrating it, visualizing it, and building dashboards with it is keeping marketers awake at night. Sure, data is rows, columns, and labels. But that’s only about 20% of the story. Then there are IMs, tweets, semi-structured web text, social actions, and network graphs. Eighty percent of data, according to Kihn, falls in this category.
- The hype cycle: get used to it. For every new digital channel, Kihn noted a hype cycle. Marketers tend to get excited about the Apple Watch, native advertising, new social channels, or whatever else is making headlines with customers. They think that thing is going to solve every problem, but of course, it won’t. Which leads to the next point…
- Successful marketers invest in analytics. The best marketers don’t invest in the latest, most-hyped technology, but invest in the best analytics. Analytics will actually help produce better results vs. adding to the noise.
- Every marketer must learn analytics. In every company, marketers must help decentralize the analytics function. Analytics must truly be for everyone. Kihn explained, “Analytics is embedded within business units; it tends to be embedded, at a high level, within operational functions like sales, and then predictive analytics and decision support can be centralized. Often those talents are not cheap.” Decentralized analytics makes everyone more accountable to the data and helps every decision become more data-oriented.
- Advanced marketers must capture insights from newer channels. New channels are great to experiment with and test creative upon, but make sure you’re capturing insights every step of the way.
- Marketing attribution is both the biggest problem and greatest opportunity facing marketers today. Creating a solid attribution and media mix model is the new data frontier.
Kihn closed by saying the most successful marketing tactics in the future will be based in predictive analytics, something that only one in five marketers is doing today.
Check out more content from Connections in this recap of the opening keynote or our YouTube playlist of Connections videos.
