Over the past forty years, marketing has experienced a Galilean shift thanks to data.
From humble beginnings in the ‘80s and ‘90s with the advent of email and e-commerce to the start of the mobile and social media revolution in the 2000s, data quickly entrenched itself as the new oil of marketing. A decade later, data underpins every marketing experience delivered across a screen today, whether that be in an online newspaper, TV, or digital out-of-home display. Indeed, even in-store experiences are becoming increasingly digitised and so reliant on data, as seen in the exponential rise of retail and commerce media.
Elevating the consumer experience through greater personalisation and relevance to their purchasing contexts, this ‘brand experience utopia’ relies upon authenticated, first-party data, i.e., that which is owned by the brand. This is the data that is collected with consent from channels such as email, subscriptions, online purchases, apps, and loyalty programs, where a consumer agrees to the value exchange offered by the brand.
First-party data provides rich insight into customer behaviour and interests and can then be used as the foundation to build a comprehensive view of addressable marketing. However, successfully leveraging this data to build an omnichannel marketing strategy is not done overnight. It requires meaningful investment in technology for data collaboration, paired with individuals with the right expertise and mindset to drive outcomes and also identify opportunities for further growth. Moreover, the data revolution, which has already gone through many iterations over the past few decades, including addressing privacy concerns in the late 2010s/early 2020s, continues to evolve at a breakneck pace and requires agile thinking. In short, the future of data-led marketing will be built on tech, talent and tenacity.
Tech – the foundation of a successful data strategy
Thankfully, making sense of datasets and making their insight available across the enterprise no longer needs to be a laborious task reserved for a human data scientist. Instead, it has been made far easier with the assistance of data clean rooms. These solutions allow different data sets, both internal and external, to be unified and activated in a privacy-sensitive way. This can be used to consolidate fragmented data into actionable customer insights.
For example, valuable customer data is often held across different departments within a business, such as within the marketing platform, customer relation management tools (CRMs), point of sale (POS) systems, enterprise resource planning tools (ERPs), or contact centre databases. This means that its potential for marketing lies dormant, but clean rooms can unlock these insights by helping to break down these data silos, therefore, enabling business decisions to be influenced more readily by data.
Moreover, clean rooms also enable privacy-conscious collaboration between different businesses. No matter how much data you have internally, it’s impossible to have an end-to-end picture of the consumer journey by yourself. But marketers can now collaborate with multiple partners to access data at scale and drive true addressability, personalisation, and incrementality.
Talent – the expertise that turns data into insights
Even the best technology is ineffective without the right people on a team. Businesses require individuals who can interpret the marketing value of data and align it with growth goals. In this way, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Data Protection Officers, and Data Scientists can hold ‘the keys to the kingdom’ in this new data-led marketing ecosystem. Indeed, they can also be a limiting factor if they are reluctant to activate data from a privacy perspective.
Those responsible for driving a data-led strategy must ensure that there is communication across the marketing, data and privacy teams, for integrating these insights across different departments and ensuring that data literacy runs from top to bottom. This is particularly important for the C-suite, where seamlessly communicating success and results of data-led strategies to secure stakeholder buy-in is very important. This is a long process that requires relationship-building and adaptability across the organisation.
Tenacity – adapting and evolving
The rapid pace of tech advancement, along with shifting consumer behaviours and changing regulations, requires companies to be agile and proactive in their data strategies. It’s important to embrace continuous improvement, constantly refine approaches, and experiment with new technologies.
Common external barriers like data privacy regulations, market disruptions, and technological limitations cannot be controlled, so companies need to focus on how they can be turned into opportunities. The most tenacious companies will seek to use these challenges as catalysts for innovation and improvement in their processes and in their relationships with customers.
The synergy of TTT for success
Blood, sweat and tears underpin successful data-led marketing. Whether that’s changing the internal language, hiring the right people, working with the right tech partners, as well as setting achievable and understandable short-term goals, a holistic approach is needed to reap the full benefits of data-led marketing and data collaboration.
Businesses should evaluate their current data strategies and identify areas where they could strengthen their capabilities, develop their teams further, and cultivate a culture of persistence and adaptability. By combining technology, skilled teams, and a forward-thinking approach to collaboration and data privacy, companies can transform their marketing strategies and unlock new opportunities for success.
About the Author
Hugh Stevens is UK MD of LiveRamp. LiveRamp is the data collaboration platform for the world’s most innovative companies. A leader in consumer privacy, data ethics, and foundational identity, LiveRamp sets the new standard for building a connected customer view with unmatched clarity and context while protecting brand and consumer trust. LiveRamp provides the flexibility to collaborate wherever data lives to support various data collaboration use cases – within organizations, between brands, and across its global network. Hundreds of global innovators – from iconic consumer brands and tech giants to banks, retailers, and healthcare leaders – rely on LiveRamp to build enduring brand and business value by deepening customer engagement and loyalty, activating new partnerships, and maximizing the value of first-party data while staying on the forefront of evolving compliance and privacy requirements.
Featured image: Adobe Stock
