To succeed in 2013 and beyond, marketers must become data Jedi.
This is because they have to deal with the deluge of data generated inside company confines about customer purchases not to mention the revealing aspects about product and service preferences consumers are divulging on social networks and across the entire online landscape.
Research firm IDC predicts that the company C-suite will require that the chief marketing officer produce strategies and tactics for how “market-driven data will significantly contribute to corporate objectives.”
In addition, to exploit the opportunities data analysis offers, the CMO and CIO must work together across multiple other operating units including sales, finance and service.
“To be successful, today’s CMO has to become a Master of Data,” says Richard Vancil, vice president, Executive Advisory Group, IDC. “The ability to do so is not just a ‘bet the marketing department’ issue, it’s a ‘bet the company’ issue. And for those who do not believe that, just look at the number of companies and industries already transformed by the Internet. And then multiply that rate of change by five times or more – and you are looking at the near future.”
Despite the high stakes big data creates for marketers, many are still struggling to understand how to capitalize on the data deluge, according to a recent Forbes blog post.
Given the critical nature of corralling the data necessary to meeting corporate objectives, where can marketers begin? Econsultancy advises marketers to adjust their thinking to acknowledge that customer data management is not a job for the IT department, but is instead core to the marketing function.
“Best practice would dictate the bringing together of a multidisciplinary team to establish the firm’s overall data strategy, which ideally needs to bridge functional silos – whether it’s marketing or production – to enable an overarching as well as a drill-down view of the organization,” according to Econsultancy.
Marketers need to take these steps to ensure they remain relevant in corporate operations:
- Identify the data that should be captured
- Focus on high data quality
- Put into place data analysis that spans corporate silos that each hold pockets of customer information needed to develop a single view of the customer
- Use data analysis to identify customers who are most likely to respond to particular offers
- Target offers to individual customers rather than mass marketing, which is less effective and more expensive
- Use data analysis to ensure that all sales and service channels have access to consistent, real-time information so that omni-channel customer services can grow
Allow customer service employees to better interact with customers by providing them with data analysis that uses buying history to allow for better service.
