Big Data

Customers with digital DNA expect data driven value

The digital native generation is bringing new expectations to brand relationships. They are mobile first, crowd sourced, and data savvy. Their first and most frequent interaction with your brand will be digital and mobile. They find out what’s cool, what’s trending, and what’s most likely to work best for them from their social networks. They don’t have emotional attachments to brands because the product is compelling or the advertising is cool. Their emotional engagement comes from unexpected insights that make them more successful. This is the new basis of customer loyalty, advocacy, and lifetime value.

Of course you still need a compelling product and cool ads (or messaging.) But once the prospect is a customer, continual engagement depends on over the top data driven insights. It’s no longer enough to just sell the hammers and saws and let the buyer go build their house. You need to monitor how they are using the hammer and saw. You need to deliver success by guiding their use of your product based on the behavior of your most successful customers. You need to leverage your position as the center of your customer universe to share best practices quickly and efficiently. The only way to do that at scale is through data.

Data Ownership vs Data Stewardship

In between the lines, you should be hearing a new philosophy with respect to customer data. Even though legally you “own” it, the data driven customer expects you to act as a data steward. You must treat their data as an asset to be used for their benefit, not just as the basis for driving revenue. Everything you provide to your customers should be designed to bring data back. Your customers should learn that the more data they provide, the more value they get in return – without negative side effects like having their data sold to an irrelevant ad network. Give to get and maintain the trust.

This has tremendous implications. Not only for marketers. Data marketing requires coordination with product development, IT, finance, fulfillment, point of sale, customer support, consulting services, sales. All these groups interact with customers and capture data on different aspects of their behavior – product usage, purchasing, problem resolution, planning, advocacy, etc. They all need to be understood to identify the most successful customers and the traits that drive their success. You can create tiers of services based on the level at which customer provide data. You can create cohorts of customers that exclude direct competitors. You can support exchanges within your customer ecosystem that enable strategic accounts to benefit from preferred peers. You can be extremely creative about how you structure your data marketing services.

The message is that in a world of shrinking product cycles, cheap knockoffs, and copycat services, data marketing is the new source of differentiation. No one else has the data you (should) have on how customers can be most successful with your products. Use it to attract and retain the best and leave the rest to your competitors.

To continue the conversation on data marketing and the data driven customer, contact me: gmurray (at) idc (dot) com.

Larger and richer collections of customer data are increasing available. That’s the good news. But most of that data is wasted. That’s the bad news. Poor data practices remain one of the biggest hurdles to marketing success.

Here are four ways that companies squander data and recommendations about how to stop the waste:

Data is Missing: A huge amount of customer data is available but is just not collected. Your ultimate goal should be to capture interaction and behavioral data at every touch point.

What to do: Acquire the data. Invest in marketing technology and services that capture data and in data management technology to store it for analysis. IDC finds that tech marketing leaders invest more than three times the amount of funds in marketing technology than their laggard cousins. Big data is the marketer’s friend. Providing lots of data to your analysts will enable them to predict the next best offer, discern buyer preferences, determine marketing program attribution, improve conversion rates, and much more.

Data is Unavailable: Some customer data is captured in company systems, but is trapped where marketing can’t access it. Marketing needs information on customers from a broad array of sources from both inside and outside the enterprise. Sales data, purchasing data, and customer service data, are examples of internally available data critical to seeing the full customer picture.

What to do: Aggregate the data. C-Suite executives must rush to the aid of marketing if they want to get full value from the function. To stop measurement at the MQL or even sales “closed loop” is insufficient for the full customer picture. Pay particular attention to converting unstructured data into structured data so it can help drive the content customization and delivery process.

Data is Junk: Sometimes customer data is captured, but is meaningless.

What to do: Analyze the data. You must be able to separate the signal from the noise. The first step is to gain a baseline understanding of the journeys taken by your best customers. This point of view will give you a filter. CMOs need to invest in the tools and skills needed to gain insight from the data and tell a relevant business story.

Data is Late: Some meaningful data is captured, aggregated, analyzed – but the whole process takes too long for any relevant action to occur.

What to do: Act on the data. The point of data investment is to develop a rich understanding of the customer’s context so the most relevant response (typically content) can be delivered to them. In a digital dialog, a response is expected on the other side of every click. Data needs to be made readily available to decision engines and content management systems so that they can take action.

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Marketing to the Data Driven Customer

80% of Your Customer Data Will be Wasted