Becoming a Data-Driven Marketing Organization
Written by Katherine Brock, Steve Dowling, & Anna Stroncek — April 14, 2020
Marketing: It’s a Team Effort
In 2020, a good customer experience isn’t created by a savvy professional with a business degree. Rather, experiences are built by leveraging data to deliver, test, and prove value in digital, real-world interactions. In this digital world, the customer experience extends far beyond the table stakes of a friendly sales representative or an automated purchase confirmation email. Customers expect you meet them where they are, on the devices they use, and deliver content that engages them. In other words, customers expect a hyper-personalized and relevant experience, every time.
While customers’ expectations around experiences are becoming more and more demanding, the variety of tools and strategies marketers are leveraging to meet these growing demands are starting to grow as well. Marketing teams are no longer a siloed group inside a company working on websites or taglines. They are becoming technology teams, partnering with other business functions to expand an organization’s capabilities and better engage with customers. While every marketing team may have different goals or be in a different stage of marketing maturity, the ones achieving the highest level of success are the ones grounding themselves in data, using it as the foundational driver for all their tools, campaigns, and analysis. This combination of data and tools allow mature marketing organizations to realize the benefits of capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI), micro-segmentation, hyper personalization, and predictive customer service — and each of these capabilities are completely dependent on data.
Using data to shape marketing may sound simple enough, but figuring out where to start, discovering what data you need to be capturing, and enabling reporting on key metrics like attribution and ROI can be a challenge for many marketing teams. Whether you’re just beginning the implementation of a marketing solution, or you’re a mature marketing organization looking to bring artificial intelligence into your ecosystem, you must take a step back and look at your data. We think it’s helpful to think about your data in two categories: inputs and outputs. Inputs are data points that are used by your marketing tools to segment and customize your campaigns. Outputs, on the other hand, are the data collected and generated by marketing efforts. It’s important to understand the relationship between inputs and outputs and ensure that you’re setting the correct foundation to provide the meaningful and personalized experiences your customers are expecting.
Inputs: The Ingredients for a Marketing Foundation
Inputs are data that marketers need to personalize, segment, and enhance user experiences. These customer data points should be brought into your marketing platform to inform campaign execution. Dimension such as customer age, location, and prior engagement create the foundation for any execution done within in a marketing tool.
Understanding what types of data your organization has will help you personalize and segment your campaigns. You’ll likely want to integrate CRM data into your marketing platform — knowing the relationship your customer has with your business is key to figuring out how to market to them. Perhaps your organization uses a customer survey tool — having those results readily available in your marketing platform allows you to communicate to your customers based on their current satisfaction with your product or offering.
Often times, thinking about the inputs comes second to the implementation of a solution, but with a variety of different data models and functionalities available within marketing platforms, especially marketing automation platforms, it’s critical to consider your data inputs in preparation for any tool selection or implementation.
When brainstorming about inputs, it is helpful to collaborate with the data team during the process. This provides them with an understanding of the goals the marketing team is trying to accomplish and in return they can help curate data about your customers through processes like web scrapping, data extraction, and data blending.
Once you have a good understanding of what types of data will help drive your campaigns and where that data lives within your organization, you need to focus on how to integrate that data in your marketing automation platform. This is where teaming up with your Data and IT teams is important because it helps democratize data and eliminates lag from idea to insight. For example, setting up scheduled jobs to regularly bring key data points into your solution will enable more dynamic campaign execution. Automated data integration solutions reduce manual workloads (think: no more manual list uploads!) and allow you to access the most up to date information about your customer.
It’s only after all the above have been defined and stood up — that your inputs can be pushed into your tool and leveraged for improved execution.
Outputs: Creating a Marketing Decision Engine
Upon execution, marketing outputs capture the results of your campaign, such as email sends, click rates, and conversions. Used in conjunction with marketing inputs and other existing data sources such as eCommerce systems, outputs can be used to drive robust reporting, increase campaign effectiveness, determine the next best actions, and provide overall deeper insights about your customers. At a high level you can think of this continuous process: analysis of outputs helps drive better campaign inputs, making each subsequent campaign more effective!
Just like inputs are critical to integrate into your marketing tool, outputs from your campaigns should be integrated into an analytics platform. The data produced from your marketing campaigns can be used to understand business problems, gain insights, and put those insights to action. By becoming a data-driven team, marketing organizations can increase ROI and improve digital experiences of their customers.
Marketing teams should continue to partner with their Data & Analytics teams after marketing execution. The marketing team can provide business context to the marketing data they are creating and the Data & Analytics teams can offer expertise on how to best analyze it to drive success in future marketing activities.
Why is the relationship between them important?
In a mature, data-driven marketing organization, inputs and outputs inform one another. Understanding how to best use data analytics to inform your campaigns allows your organization to become more proactive and leads to more satisfied and loyal customers.
As the marketing team continues to execute campaigns, they create more outputs. These outputs should be continuously analyzed and leveraged to determine the next step or next best action in a customer’s experience. They can be used to inform how to best use inputs, like what customer segment to target, to create enhanced campaigns and touch points that yield new outputs and insights.
At Slalom, we like to think of the relationship between inputs and outputs as a continuous cycle, always improving and evolving. We enjoy helping our clients define their data strategy and set their data driven foundations.
If you’re curious about learning more about how to use data to enhance your marketing organization, please reach out to us — we’d love to talk!
Contact us!
Katherine Brock: Katherine.Brock@slalom.com
Steve Dowling: Steve.Dowling@slalom.com
Anna Stroncek : Anna.Stroncek@slalom.com
