by Prakash Patel (@prakashpatel_1) I would like to conclude the Five Steps to Data-Driven Marketing (DDM) by combining the final two steps, 4 and 5, as one as they are so closely connected — data management and marketing, and closing the loop from ‘cradle to grave’.
But, before we dive into them, let’s do a quick checklist and recap on what I have discussed previously to help you become a #DDM organisation:
Checklist
#Step1: Getting strategic
- You’ve set a clear vision
- You’ve carried out a data-flow audit end to end
- You’ve put together a top-level data strategy
#Step2: Building the foundation
- You’ve started doing so by bridging the gap between CMOs and CIOs — a collaborative partnership
- You’ve detailed customer experience, mapped out across touch-points
#Step3: Data mining through a single view
- You’ve created a holistic database that has a single view of its customers/prospects, based on the three key tiers:
- Building a single-view data foundation fit for marketing
- Data-analysis tools to allow data interrogation etc
- Data-visualisation tools to allow you to view and unlock insights to drive DDM
Recap
By covering steps 1 through to 3, you should now be in a pretty strong position as to knowing: a lot more about your organisation’s data flow; how data is viewed and championed; roles and responsibilities from the top down; and how to be more strategic in understanding the single view of a customer — all the way through to understanding the importance of marketing systems that store your data, which is fit for purpose (not just for IT), and the tools required to analyse, manage and process the data.
The prize is in sight!
So, to wrap up the final two steps of this journey, let’s talk frankly about what I think is the best part of this framework: doing DDM with greater emphasis on data quality, targeting and management. Through this, you should then become part of the 20% who do marketing better through data, as reported recently by Adobe, according to Venturebeat.
“Top online marketers achieve more than three times the conversion rates of the bottom third, according to a new digital marketing optimization study from Adobe.
“Why? They invest in a culture of data, testing, optimization, and analytics. “Leading companies prioritize optimization,” Adobe executive director Michael Krypel said. “They invest time, resources, and budget, giving the top 20 percent of companies a conversion rate 1.7X the average rate.”
With these frightening yet beautiful numbers, you have to be, well, insane and irresponsible not to consider DDM for maximising your ROI and conversion rate to ultimately impress your stakeholders.
#Step 4: Data management and marketing
Well you are now positioned to put together a DDM strategy and framework to help you drive DDM. Sounds simple? Nothing in life is really simple, but it can be simpliflied with the right processes, methodologies and tools (which you have or have access to through your partners or agencies).
Doing DDM will require analytical thinking, commitment, perseverance, patience, planning, learnings and, more importantly, having a target in sight that is honed by processes and resource. The following are my final thoughts and tasks for doing DDM:
If you don’t know which of your customers are most likely to defect, how can you stop them?
People
As with any platform or tool, without the right people, they are just tools (good, bad or indifferent). To me, tools are like having the best F1 car, without a F1 driver… You and I may be able to drive a passenger car, but trying to drive an F1 car is a completely different game and we would probably crash within in seconds. This is the same about steps 4 and 5.
You may now have the thinking, the buy-in from C-suites, a strategy and data — you now need to have the right people, with the right mind set to drive everything and to make it a reality, people such as data statisticians and analysts who love data and are able to interrogate, question it, use the tools to truly drive greater and better DDM. They have the skills and experience to know what to ask of the data intelligently.
The second-most important person or skill, I believe, is the data planner.
However, let’s not forget tools currently in the market have the end-user in mind, not just statisticians and technical analysts (as it was years ago) — marketers or agency folks who may be analytically minded and not just database administrators or analysts.
In my experience, it is more about the mindset and approach to looking at data and asking the “why” questions, such as:
- Why have we got such a high attrition rate?
- Why are people not converting once they have tested our product?
- What is the true lifetime value of my customers? And
- How can I find or predict more likeminded customers?!
Data planner
As with anything in marketing, without planning, the end is never near or in sight. In this context, I am talking about data planning (a convenient job title created about two decades ago by AdLand, when agencies felt data bureaux and data geeks were useful but not sexy, only to realise the personnel with the knowledge and insights were the ones who really pulled the cord at the top table.
So, finding a good data planner is like finding a good strategist — but with data skills.
A typical role of a data planner is to hypothesis, calculate and strategise the data requirements for your campaign through to being able to interrogate the data using tools and software. Without this your campaign is… just a campaign, with no relevance or targeting.
This brings me to my next point:
Targeting
If you read the original marketing definition — which is “the management process of identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitable” — then I always ask: Why don’t we do targeted mailings? Surely this one word concludes the requirements of the three words in the definition (identifying, anticipating and satisfying).
Back to my point — if you are about to do a campaign in the new year to 100 000 individuals and have a prospect base of 1m records to select from, what does targeting and DDM look like to you?
For some marketers, this could just be a simply a promotional mailing to its existing customer base by asking its agency to put together some award-winning creative, then asking the IT dept (or your data partner) to select 100 000 records for the mailing… which all would be a complete waste of money, time and another classic example of junk mail where <1% response rate is deemed acceptable.
What about asking whom you are targeting, what the promotional products are and aligning them with your customer base (remember the Target case study in my first article?), through to identifying non-responders, predictive and behavior analysis etc? There is so much that can and should be done before doing any type of mailing — on or offline — which takes me to my next simple point about the power of data in three easy steps:
Data principles: I3 Model
Throughout my articles, I have written about the power of data; now I want to share with you one of my oldest models I created about a decade ago which I use to explore the principles of data and what I believe are the most important questions you should ask about data. I call this the I3 Model:
These are the three basic questions about data exploration, from what insights can we discover through to data interrogation, then using these insights and applying intelligence in what you want to achieve and then driving more impactful communication.
Surely, at the end of the day, this is exactly what we are all trying to do in using DDM? Driving more relevant and impactful communication to the most responsive selected audiences, at the most appropriate time, using the most relevant medium.
#Step 5: Closing the loop from ‘cradle to grave’
After all the effort, cost, resource and management, the final step is all about closing the loop.
One of my career-long bugbears is when marketers do a campaign and take the results as a fact until the next one. One of the biggest areas of marketing and DDM is the ability to look at data strategically and, more importantly, look at the results (yes, measurements — something we all talk about, brag about in pitches to clients — yet seldom do properly) even more strategically and with an inquisitive mind…
Why? I feel sometimes that we do campaigns, look at the award results and think: “That was brilliant; let’s do it again” through to “Oh no, that wasn’t too good; let’s do something different — umm, let’s change the creative” as opposed to looking at the results, the responses and, ultimately, what the learnings were.
To me, it’s all about understanding the entire data journey from ‘cradle to grave”. From the moment customers shares their data with you for the first time, to the moment you create single views, through to all the tactical communications you do and to becoming a customer and finally driving loyalty by building trustworthy and meaningful relationship over time.
Biggest failure
The biggest failure is when we don’t #learn, we don’t #reapply, we don’t #test and we don’t #review.
Regardless if the work and results are great, learning has to be the most important aspect of our jobs. Understand what worked and what didn’t work; then test and try to always better our results with purpose and longevity. As I wrote in my first article — “there’s gold in those data mines”.
To conclude my Five Steps to #DDM, think of data as one of your company’s biggest assets. It is not a new phenomenon, or only for geeks and IT personnel, but for the whole organisation from the top down. Understand the power and opportunities it may afford your company.
Never a better time
2014 has come and gone; there is never a better time than now to make a 2015 New Year’s Resolution for work that can add value to your bottom line and help your organisation become more strategic and relevant in results-yielding marketing efforts.
#TheFutureisBright #TheFutureisDigital
Prakash Patel (@prakashpatel_1) is chief strategy officer at Fogg Experiential Design, a technically-enabled, digitally-led, creatively-inspired, data-driven and strategically-focused design company based in Johannesburg and Cape Town. He has over 25 years of experience in advertising and data planning, a passion for integrated marketing strategies, and believes that the holy grail of marketing has always been — and always will be — data. Prakash contributes the monthly “#3D” (Data-Driven & Digital) column to MarkLives.com, exploring how data-driven and digital marketing can add value to marketing communication.
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