Data-Driven Marketing Decision throughout a Customer Journey

To establish a successful business in today’s world, it is crucial to combine a customer’s experience with anchored interactions, firm insights and an individualized approach. This era of digital technologies requires us to closely monitor trends, behaviors, and preferences of our customers to effectively respond to any changes that affect their relationship with our business.

Every marketer is dealing with two critical problems when it comes to building a productive strategy to demonstrate growth.

1) Decreasing human attention span: With an average attention span of 12 seconds in the 2000s, to now only spanning at an average of 7 seconds per person, much lower than a goldfish, sustaining one’s consciousness has proven to be a formidable challenge. In 2019, the total of “Global Google News stories by URL stood at 120 million”, which means, every 60 seconds, 172 new stories appear in google. So if you’re on the front page of the news, you still only have 7 seconds of someone’s time if the content deems irrelevant in the first few seconds to the target.

2) No impactful results: Research shows that most CMOs of mid to large-sized organizations question the overwhelming priority of delivering worthy results and financial outcomes of a marketing campaign. Only about 43% of these companies are successfully using data analytics to make decisions for their customers. One-third of the information collected directly demonstrates the impact of marketing spends during a period of time. The result of these unsuccessful campaigns reflects on the cost of marketing incurred through each channel. Without having a solid report of quantitative metrics in hand, companies are increasing spending on social media, CRM, branding, and new product introduction. The Solution

There are 5 steps to adapt to a Data-Driven Business:

1) Making decisions with Data: The big gap can be reduced by implementing a system of data-backed decisions into the organizational structure. The evolution of a company from being data resistant to data-driven could take long but has shown significant improvements for agile companies. “Guessing” may have worked for past marketers, but to initiate a competitive edge in the market, one needs to utilize the power of available data and curate customer experience on the sole basis of the well-analyzed data.

2) Apprehending customer journey: “Funnels are for marketers at the expense of customers. Journeys are for customers at the expense of marketers.” Remember, we still need funnels. They are just as important as they were in the past. But today, our customer is watching your social media ad on Instagram and simultaneously buying a product from Amazon in the next browser. Customer's behaviors are no more in the linear form. They get off the path and can be in different stages of the journey at the same time. Targeting with a sense of recognition at all levels is crucial and the forefront outcome can be intensified by individualized data.

3) Recognize the right marketing technology: Understand the various tools available to us over the internet today and make sense of it. Marketing technology never starts with tools. The first question you should be asking is not the “how”. Start with “why”. Why you need the technology, why you’re doing what you’re doing, why it is working. Map the tools for each stage of the journey. You may figure out that one technology can be used every step of the process. For example, social media is a constant tool that should be leveraged by every business, be it B2B or B2C. Figuring out the “why” you need the strategy is highly imperative. Then comes the “who”. Who is using it, who is in charge of the tech, does the company have a good governance system, who’s responsible for it? Then obtain the detailed process to secure repetitive results. Creativity is key to some phases, but you need to have a structure in place. Only then you can optimally utilize the tech in front of you. This is then followed by execution, and in the end, measuring the effectiveness of the effort.

4) Associate your goals: Tying analytical objectives with a financial value is of utmost necessity. The benefits of evolving to data-driven customer experiences include quality improvements, cost reduction and enhancing revenue generation. The greater alignment of the processes, involving not only creative efforts but also analytical technologies is a key component. For the most part, taking Google Analytics as an example, a Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) should be reflected in the Net Customer Value. Sales & Marketing Qualified Lead Value (SQLV, MQLV) could be used to determine the Net Deal Value (NDV). Creating centralized data insights, viewing the data holistically and applying those cases into a customer success will enable a sheer volume of productive results.

5) Map your customer journey: After having your goals, understand if the channels helped the conversion at a given stage. Using tools such a Google Analytics makes it easier to visualize the data insights. It helps businesses understand the value generated by each marketing channel. Leveraging on an unprecedented amount of customer data to deliver the right experience will turn the all potential stagnant efforts to high-performing campaigns. And this is will in-turn result in optimizing every brand-customer interaction, hence pushing the business in a positive growth direction.

So how to get to the future?  Follow this process. Figure out where your business is. If the business culture doesn’t believe in the value of data, all the analysis is a waste.

Contrivance the change towards a data-driven business. Transform your business.