Transforming Marketing Data into Actionable Insights
Highlights
Data is increasingly the key element that drives marketing success and business growth.
With the large amount of business data that is now available, organizations can easily get derailed as they try to make the most of it.
Prime 8 has extensive experience implementing data-driven marketing and recommends five key steps for getting it right.
In business today, if you’re serious about marketing, it’s likely you’re also serious about data. The two go hand-in-hand. Of course, other things — the product, the message, the unique chemistry generated by a talented sales rep — are all important, but in the digital era, it’s data that makes the difference.
In this article, we’ll look at how Prime 8 helps organizations implement data-driven marketing strategies including five key steps that are critical for transforming marketing data into actionable insights.
Data-Driven Marketing Today
Long before the digital era, marketers took data seriously. Direct marketers would segment their mailing lists based on demographic data — age, gender, location, education level, etc. Broadcast advertisers relied on audience measurement systems such as Nielsen.
Online marketing continued that tradition but took it to a new level thanks to the wealth of granular data generated by digital interactions, such as the following:
Behavioral data: website visits, click-through rates, page views, email open rates
Customer psychographics: interests, values, and concerns as evidenced by content interaction and social media engagement
Customer journey: the touchpoints that customers follow on their journey from awareness to purchase
Mining this kind of data has become an art form for business-to-consumer titans like Amazon, Netflix, and Starbucks, but it has also become the norm in business-to-business marketing.
Tactics such as account-based marketing or buyer personas take their cues from the vast amount of data now available about people and companies through online interactions.
And data driven marketing doesn’t benefit only sellers — buyers increasingly expect it. According to a survey on customer engagement of more than 14,300 consumers and business buyers conducted by the CRM provider Salesforce, two-thirds of respondents said they expect companies to use data to understand their unique needs. And more than half expect offers to be personalized.
Five Key Steps for Transforming Marketing Data into Actionable Insights
There is no shortage of data available to help shape marketing outreach today. And that’s a good thing — when it comes to understanding markets and potential customers, you can’t have too much information. But the deluge of data will only get you so far.
Extracting actionable insights requires strategy, organization, context, data visualization, and a commitment to continuous improvement.
Let’s look at each of these elements in more detail.
1. STRATEGY
A common mistake many organizations make is to let the data dictate the marketing. A better approach is to create a data strategy based on the answers to questions like these:
What are your KPIs when it comes to marketing?
What information do you need to achieve those KPIs?
What is the marketing ROI you want to achieve?
What data do you need to get there?
For an example of how easy it is to focus on the wrong information, consider the experience of a global technology services provider that had launched a pre-sale marketing campaign that wasn’t delivering results.
We were called in to evaluate the campaign — the offer, the messaging, the audience — and soon identified the problem: While the customer base of the client overwhelmingly consisted of small and medium-sized companies, the design of the marketing outreach with its offer of a free demonstration was better suited to large enterprise clients.
Re-segmenting the marketing outreach with a sharper focus on bigger companies ultimately brought about higher ROI.
2. DATA ORGANIZATION
Once you know the data that will help you achieve the right results, you need to make sure it’s available. Very often, critical data is trapped inside organizational siloes or legacy platforms and cannot be deployed to support marketing.
For example, we were engaged by a global tech company that was spending millions connecting to customers using an array of touchpoints — from digital ads to in-store promotional events — but had no way of assessing which marketing efforts were successful and which weren’t.
Not all teams were collecting all the needed data. And the data that was collected was organized and allocated differently from one division to another.
To address the situation, Prime 8 developed a solution to standardize data collection and combine everything into a robust Azure SQL database that could be leveraged by Power BI.
These basic data organization challenges are important today and are only going to become more critical with the growing use of AI. The 2023 Global Trends in AI Report found that sourcing, organizing, and managing data are the leading challenges for companies that want to implement AI technology.
3. CONTEXT
Raw data by itself seldom tells a complete story. You need context — the broader conditions that may or may not be under your control.
For example, companies of all kinds experienced a dramatic increase in online customer interactions during the COVID pandemic. To understand what that really means for your company, it’s essential to break things down across different microsegments, for example, millennials versus baby boomers.
Another example: You are seeing a decline in sales of a particular product or service, but it’s one you are no longer updating with new features, so your profit margins are actually higher. How should that impact your marketing investment?
Context is critical.
4. DATA VISUALIZATION
Your marketing is the story of your business. You need to tell that story and make it compelling to different decision makers across your organization.
Business intelligence (BI) dashboards specifically focused on monitoring and managing customer outreach are increasingly essential in today’s multi-channel marketing environment and can be adapted to meet the needs of their audience.
For example, C-level executives look for the big picture, while managers are interested in specific business drivers in their areas. A well-designed dashboard provides all of this and more.
At Prime 8, we feel so strongly about the use of dashboards for delivering customer experience that we’ve identified it as one of our six BI best practices decision makers must adopt.
5. CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
Consumer behavior keeps changing, so the data you collect also needs to evolve. Major disruptions such as the COVID pandemic may call for big changes, but more likely the evolution takes place a little bit at a time — a process of continuous improvement, addressing incremental, small-scale changes to your marketing efforts on a regular basis.
This can include tracking how you are staying on top of specific KPIs. Or deploying A/B testing on different segments, offers, and messages.
Be wary of findings that seem to apply universally across all channels. With the average customer making use of multiple channels and devices through the buying cycle, the most compelling findings are often the small differences that emerge for one channel versus another.
Staying agile in your data collection and analysis is crucial for adapting to the ever-changing landscape of consumer behavior. A proactive approach to continuous improvement enables you to adapt swiftly to incremental changes in consumer behavior, ensuring that your marketing strategies remain effective across diverse channels and touchpoints.
Let Us Help You Transform Data into Actionable Insights
At Prime 8 Consulting, we strive to help our clients get the most out of their marketing data, delivering business insights and actionable intelligence. Whether you are looking to go to the next level with your data-driven marketing strategies or are just getting started, let us show you the way.
