Modern technology now basks in the glow of Big Data. Truly, we are spoilt with an abundance of digital information about brands, customer interactions and the amount of potent promotion technologies in our hands - but the task still remains to selectively collate this data to yield the useful insights with the greatest effect.
What we know is that customers take a myriad of meandering paths to conversion, and that each customer generates a stream of data from each and every interaction. Big Data is great, but entirely useless if you're unable to glean the useful insights from it.
The challenge remains the same age-old chestnut; to deliver better, more relevant user experiences. But how? We feel it requires full commitment to a data-driven strategy across the whole company by all teams and departments, as a means to a deeper understanding of audience and applying this shared knowledge to create better insights for marketing and advertising.
In February 2017, Think With Google published an article that identified one of the challenges facing marketeers is dealing with data-related challenges such as accessing or integrating data and not having the resource at hand to manage the torrent of information being generated via digital platforms or lacking top-level endorsement.
What this article identified was that without clear data and analytics, or top level support, marketeers would struggle to make informed decisions on the path to success.
To transform your own company and adopting a data-driven strategy you can encourage all levels of employees to help generate data streams, not just from the top. By utilising all levels of staff, you can develop a data-led analytical strategy that guides your business in its daily marketing. Whilst every business is unique - goals vary, audience requirements are different - there is commonality that from a marketing standpoint it requires breaking down the brick walls around silos departments and for teams to share knowledge and data with the marketing team to facilitate a truly integrated approach that is key for any digital marketing campaign.
Below are 3 key reasons why knowledge sharing is crucial to an improved marketing approach
1 - Combine data sources for a more holistic view of your audience and their needs
Marketing insights mean more than just interactions with pay per click ads or on-site engagement metrics. It includes social metrics, email marketing, multi-channel attribution across online and offline channels, communication in-store if you have a place of business...
Individual channels only provide fragmented views of your audience and it is only by a holistic understanding of your audience - gained by multi-channel attribution and sharing of data - that a business can ascertain with clarity who their audience is and what their needs are.
To improve your own data analysis, you should identify the sources you need to answer questions related to achieving your business goals and outline a strategy to integrate these sources, various as they may be, even if your business does not own the data such as if you are using third-parties.
2. Encourage data sharing across teams
Departmental silos are a common complaint in most businesses. Brick walls slow or stop the flow of communication and information and prevents optimum performance.
There are two routes to encourage data-sharing internally;
- Realign or reorganise your teams to support clarity of data and knowledge sharing
- Democratise your data so that all teams can access an open source of data
Once data is accessible for the marketer then it is possible to put that data into practice by incorporating it into the marketing strategy. It's very important that education and training is considered when adopting a data-driven culture. Education is something that should also be encouraged as part of data-sharing across teams. Don't allow the data or analytics to create a barrier to decision-making, it should facilitate a much more agile and fluid marketing approach that is widely understood, logical and founded on shared knowledge. Reading and interpreting data, insights and performance reports can help marketing professionals to see the opportunities and to update messaging and creative to optimise investments and gain greater ROI.
3. Integrate data with advertising technology and turn insight into action
Once you've achieved step one and two, your data and analytics strategy should inform the marketer on the related advertising technologies and digital strategy for the business. Once knowledge is shared and you've integrated team data to gain a holistic view of your audience it is is possible to then adopt relevant technologies to target valuable segments and apply customised marketing strategy for personalised user experience.
Integrating data is pointless if you don't act on the insights. Once you've adopted a customer-level approach that joins up analytics and data with marketing decision and technology then you are more likely to:
- use data to create customised, personal user experiences
- optimise in real time
- segment audiences to reach groups of individuals
- attribute and evaluate multiple channels
- attribute and evaluate device targeting
- work together to allocate budgets more effectively
With a shared-knowledge and holistic data set, marketers arm themselves with all the data required to make better-informed decisions. Collaborative teams that share insights and work together to improve each touch point of the user journey, and marketers engaging them using integrated technologies to make the whole process more relevant and engaging.