How marketing, IT can boost digital data tactics
Everyone has been talking about the importance of big data for some time now. While most marketers know that collecting customer data is central to generating positive results to a marketing strategy, there are still plenty of misconceptions about how to effectively put that data to good use, according to a recent research by the Harvard Business Review.
And as always, the devil is in the details.
“Customer-data strategies require deep thinking, multiple strategies and patience. Even if the greatest analytics system was on your wish list, you’d only just have begun making any sense out of it,” said Maria D’Costa, an IT developer working for a Dubaibased marketing agency.
First and foremost, marketers need to be particularly cautious of privacy issues when collecting large sets of customer data.
“It is best to start with the basics, such as customer names and mailing and e-mail addresses. Other data points to collect for an overall demographic snapshot are age, profession and gender,” says Poonam Jangir, a marketing consultant based in Dubai.
As you develop trust with your customers, Jangir suggests going deeper and collection transactional data as well as asking customers for certain psychographic data points to create a marketing strategy that suits each of customer individually. It is also important to note that, increasingly, companies don’t really suffer from a problem of having too little data. The greater challenge is how to qualify and simplify the right data and then make it actionable.
The Harvard Business Review study also enumerated that the data’s incompatibility and lack of integration is one of the main challenges limiting the value of big data to marketers.
“Data keeps getting dumped in various spreadsheet files, all with different structures, functions and owners. Although spreadsheet
The greater challenge is how to qualify and simplify the right data and then make it actionable
files are useful as a band aid for integrating data, they are completely inadequate in supporting real-time marketing campaigns,” said D’Costa. Keep the spreadsheet file, by all means, but look for a modern data management platform that allows your company to provide easy access to data and reporting by different stakeholders and channels, she adds.
That data management platform can bring the entire marketing department much closer to a single version of the truth which can then be used for segmenting users and launching campaigns with a higher degree of accuracy and quality.
Another common misunderstanding marketers have about customer data is not realising its limits, according to the research.
While specialised advances are continuously being made in mining text based unstructured data, other forms such as video data are still not that easily analysed.
“Experimenting, not big data analytics, is what really helps marketers move from showing correlations to making reliable predictions of customer behaviour,” the research further clarifies.
Marketers also tend to have difficulty with evaluating causal relationships within the large — often overlapping — pools of data they have collected.
This is because large data sets usually contain a number of very similar observations that can lead to unauthentic correlations and as a result mislead managers in their decision-making.
“The skill in making data valuable is being able to move from mere observational correlations to correctly identifying what correlations indicate a causal pattern and should form the basis for strategic action,” said D’Costa. The writer is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. Views expressed are her own and do not reflect the newspaper’s policy.