The customer of the future is here, and brands must evolve in response. At Deloitte, connecting for impact is a rule we live by. The Marketing Strategy and Transformation team helps organizations to create conquering marketing strategies and optimize their capabilities to deliver undeniable value. This "Elements of a future-proof marketing organization" blog series is dedicated to sharing our point of view on several pressing marketing challenges. It is time for brands to adapt their marketing strategies to become future-proof and stay relevant. Let us start with data-driven marketing!
The changing customer world
As customer expectations continue to be on the rise, marketers are shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach. Organizations sense the need to better understand their customers in order to stay relevant in the future. Therefore, we can observe increasing investment in data collection and activation capabilities to generate insights about customers, thus facilitating this shift.. Marketing organizations require a move from mass communication and intuition-led, to personalized and insight-led marketing activities and relationship development. Organizations that shift their approach are therefore better able to meet, and even exceed customer expectations and strengthen brand equity in a dynamic market.
What is data-driven marketing
Data-driven marketing (DDM) is a way of executing customer communication and engagement, as well as identifying innovation opportunities, by making use of data and insights, while continuously measuring and optimizing.
DDM consists of five main components: Identify, Capture, Analyze, Activate and Optimize
- Identify: Having a clear vision of the data needs and use cases, defined in a (customer) data strategy, for a targeted and optimized data collection
- Capture: Establishing relevant and connected sources of customer data in a responsible and compliant way, in line with the data strategy
- Analyze: Enabling access to collected data points to identify relevant segments and deeper, actionable insights
- Activate: Using insights to activate customers through relevant communication and creating experiences, across digital touchpoints
- Optimize: Embedding a test and learn mindset, continuously optimizing performance and making well-informed strategic and operational decisions
Some examples of DDM use cases are personalization, loyalty programs, lookalike targeting and improved website traffic.
Data-driven marketing can help answer some of the following questions for marketers:
- What are our key customer segments and how do we activate them with the right engagement & value proposition?
- How can we use insights to continuously validate and optimize our media planning?
- How should we organize the marketing team to be data-driven? What skills, processes and tech do we need?
- How can we use data to identify which innovations we should introduce to meet our customers’ needs and expectations?
How to become fully data-driven
The journey towards becoming an experienced data-driven marketing organization is progressive. It requires investment across three categories of capabilities: people & process, technology & tooling, and data & analytics.
Why to invest in data-driven marketing
DDM unlocks value for the business, marketers, and customers. Businesses can increase sales from campaigns by 15% on average and double-down on their return on advertising spend (ROAS). Marketers can strengthen campaigns through improved targeting, tracking of customer behavior across devices and identifying engagement patterns. They are also able to continuously identify and optimize actionable customer segments. With these segments they can leverage insights to create more personalized customer experiences, improving customer engagement, conversion, and retention. Customers benefit from data-driven marketing through experiences that trigger their emotions. Because it is exactly what they need, where and when they need it.
Source: Deloitte
Do you see the added value of data-driven marketing, but experience challenges to integrate it into your business? Contact us to learn more about data-driven marketing.
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Kasia Blicharz
Kasia is a partner in Advertising, Marketing and Commerce practice with focus on Consumer and Retail. She has 20 years experience in digital, data and marketing. She has worked with some of the leading FMCGs around embedding tech, making sense of data, instilling digital first culture and helping to create robust marketing organizations. Her passion is helping to translate and elevate human experiences into daily work of organizations. Her leading role in AM&C is helping clients to elevate their customer experiences through defining and building digital capabilities and way of working to execute on this. Typically this involves new digital and marketing strategies, technology (customer data, marketing automation, ecommerce tooling), content (brand strategy, UX/UI design, campaign content) and operating model components (governance set-up, make/buy/partner decisions, skill building and organization restructuring).