Marketers are expected to manage multiple different campaigns, activities and audiences all at the same time. We’re expected to optimize them and exceed results each time. We’re also expected to use the data generated from these activities in clever and beneficial ways.
There are more tools than ever at our disposal but there are few tools that allow you to bring data sources together in a compelling and effective way.
The question is, how can we be expected to do this effectively when the data needed is stuck in silos?
This is when integrated marketing data comes into play.
This strategy enables marketers bring together diverse data sources into a single data view.
Using Brandwatch data visualization product, Vizia, to provide marketers with the tool they need to organize disparate data sources into a holistic view.
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With integrated marketing data, companies are seeing increased growth, more effective reporting and increased efficacy for time and spend.
Given the importance of this strategy and its lesser known nature, we wanted to shed some light on the benefits of this strategy and how you and your team can start implementing this today.
Bring clarity to your customer journeyProtect your brand from dangerEnable your team to be truly data-drivenBe more agileMake smarter investmentsLook beyond traditional sources and successes
1. Bring clarity to your customer journey
Everyone wants to learn more about their customers and get closer to them. In fact, we’re becoming customer obsessed trying to relentlessly improve the customer experience.
Forrester produced a report in 2015 that primes customer-first strategies with the following:
Technology and economic forces have changed the world to such a great extent that an obsession with winning, serving, and retaining customers is the only possible response. But the best intentions do not a customer-obsessed enterprise make— Forrester, The Operating Model For Customer Obsession.
The problem is that there are countless customer touch points, both online and offline.
The customer-journey is messy and fragmented and tracking it appropriately takes time and effort.
The flip side is that customers don’t care how complex their journey is or how hard it is for a marketing team to organize. The large majority of customers won’t even consider it. When attention spans are so low and offerings are so wide, brands need to be on the top of their game, with a customer-first outlook in order to win.
Taking this into account, the fact remains that we need to have an overview of the customer journey in order to serve our customers effectively. This means bringing together data to create a single customer-view.
The first step in this process is identifying each of your customer touchpoint and mapping them to a journey as best as possible.
This journey, of course, will change depending on your personas and products. However, having a high level overview will help create the sub journeys.
If your use of personas is not underpinned by data evidence, then it’s just guesswork. Utilizing analytic tools and qualitative research allow you to gather, interpret, and understand customer behaviors. Because of the proliferation of data sources, companies today have more information than ever to gain fresh insights into customer preferences and motivations.— Carrie McIlveen, Metia
Creating personas requires a balance of data and subjective knowledge. From marketing to account management, your customer-facing teams know your customers best: talk to them.
Then look to the data. Tools like Brandwatch Analytics allow you to conduct powerful research and segmentation. Look at behaviors, preferences and motivations.
The important thing to note on personas is that it’s not a one-off event, these profiles should be evolved consistently and adapted based on socio, political and even environmental changes. The more confidence you have in your personas the easier it will be to understand them and reach them at the right time.
When mapping the journey, be mindful of the different pain points and moments of friction for customers. Is there way you can provide more value or reduce the friction at these moments. The easier the transition for the customer, the greater the greater the chance for success.
Spotlight
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Looking at a typical customer journey for a customer in the consumer tech industry, we can see there are multiple different touchpoints that take place online and offline.
Each touchpoint requires a different data source so understanding the relationship between these points is difficult with a fragmented view.
With Vizia, we’re looking at the typical data sources that marketing require and building them into the platform. This means that our customers can visualize tv data from IQ Media, alongside search data from Pi Datametrics while also having an overview of social, forum and news data from Brandwatch Analytics.
The ability to view these essential sources in tandem, allows marketers to not only have an overview of the customer journey in real-time but also identify opportunities more quickly.
The more value you provide at each stage, the happier your customers will be. This will in turn lengthen the customer lifecycle value, helping you and your brand succeed and grow.
2. Protect yourself from danger
You don’t need us to tell you how quickly information moves.
There are 350,000 tweets posted per minute, and any one of those could be the catalyst for a brand crisis. This is not something you want to happen. Access to information is almost completely democratized meaning that once a piece of information gets to a certain stage, there’s very little a brand can do about it, and often when they try to do something it backfires.
One of the ways that brands can avoid a reputation crisis is through an integrated marketing strategy. Having a hold on all of your key data sources, being able to visualize them in a single view, all while doing it in real-time, will allow marketers (and beyond) to be as prepared as possible in the event of a crisis.
CASE STUDY
In April 2017, American Airlines was involved in a high-profile incident between a customer and a crew member onboard a flight.
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Brandwatch Vizia enabled the communications team to monitor the volume and tone of social conversation associated with the situation, as well as the related images that were being shared.
Having a visual representation of how conversations were unfolding helped them keep their finger on the pulse of the situation, and most importantly, allowed them to ensure any media reports or other stories about the incident were accurate.
Access to real-time data is pivotal. The sooner you are alerted to something, the easier it is to control or manage the situations. By integrating different data sources, it’s easier to have a clear picture of what’s going on.
Naturally, you need to have access to all of your key data sources. This may require collaboration with other teams in order to achieve and aligned view. When it comes to crisis monitoring there are some obvious starting points:
So you have connected your data sources in real-time and have a clear view of the information at hand, but quite often issues evolve beyond the marketing team. Therefore, you need to be able to seamlessly share this information with the relevant teams.
The more aligned teams are on an issue, the easier it is to solve while also reducing the chances of making ill-informed decisions.
Ideally, you want to use the same platform to integrate sources, visualize them in real-time and distribute them accordingly.
The ability to seamlessly integrate different data sources allows us to blend social with any other data source. We already have data such as consumer contact centre and google analytics data blended with social data. The screens are in all our global offices and in our senior exec offices so they can see consumer trends in real time. The control hub means we can control the messaging all over the company.— Ash Tapia, Digital Data Analytics Manager - Unilever
3. Enable your team to be truly data-driven
Data is absolutely everywhere but the fact of the matter is that we still don’t know what to do with it.
There’s simply too much to wrangle effectively and this create a sense of disillusionment.
One of the keys to being more data-driven is to look at what is at hand and attempt to organize that. Don’t try to bite off more than you can chew.
There’s no shortage of marketing data, and all of the studies say we should be using it more and better, but this doesn’t just happen overnight. It requires a genuine change in mindset and can take time. However, if you want to succeed, there is no alternative.
“Leading marketers are more than twice as likely as the mainstream to say they routinely take action based on insights and recommendations from analytics.”
A good place to start is to to identify the key challenges that make cause blockers for a data-driven marketing approach. Some common organizations barriers include:
Overcoming the fear of failure (fail forward)Getting comfortable with ambiguity (being open to change)Breaking down silos (data and communication)Trusting data over whims, gut reactions and past experiences
While some of these of issues of mindset, others can be overcome with an integrated data approach and tools like Vizia.
Having identified the challenges, you must put a plan in place that will help you achieve your goal. According to Data-Driven Marketer’s Strategic Playbook, out of four markers agreed that lack of team education and training on data and analytics is their biggest barrier to basing more decisions on data insights. This creates an obvious starting point. However, there are other factors your need to have in place:
Lead with leadershipBe open to change and riskBe clear on your data strategyWork together and keep talkingHire data specific roles
Addressing and driving these factors will enable your team to think more openly and creatively about data.
The more ingrained it becomes in the team, the more decisions will be made backed-by data.
In order to achieve this, you need to have the right technology in place. Vizia allows your teams, not matter where in the world, to have access to the same data and distribute insights seamlessly. This means you can have connected overview of your marketing data while aligning the teams on the insights that matter.
Vizia is the only data visualization platform to provide access to owned, earned and paid social data, search data, CRM data, web analytics data, offline and paywalled press data and connectors for internal sources.
This, and the range of visualization available, means your teams have no excuses when it comes to adopting a data-driven.
Vizia leverages the power of visual content to deliver insight to our business from all sides of the house. We recognize the ability to mentally process images 60k faster than text and this helps our people to quickly assess and take action.— Alison Herzog, Director, Global Social Business Strategy - Dell
4. Be more agile
We all want to be more agile, that goes without saying.
The old days of rigorous (and lengthy) campaign planning are coming to an end. Brands simply can’t afford to take six months to turn around a campaign. The world moves too quickly now.
But ‘being agile’, just like being data-driven, doesn’t happen overnight, it requires organization and planning.
There is often a smaller section of the marketing team that operates in an agile way. This team is designed to spot opportunities from data and activities and turn them into successful campaigns at speed.
We won’t go into detail about the steps involved in building an agile marketing team, however we will explain how you can use integrated to bolster your existing efforts.
McKinsey’s detailed step-by-step guide says this:
Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating.— McKinsey, Agile marketing: A step-by-step guide
This is what integrated marketing and Vizia can help with.
Firstly, it can help surface opportunities quicker by being able to view data sources side by side. Take search and social data for instance. These two data sources give entirely different perspectives on customers.
On search we’re direct and to the point whereas on social we lead with our heart and let emotions, opinions and criticisms flow. Being able to compare these data sources allows you to identify deep and rich insights on your customers and audiences.
Secondly, integrated data allows you to engage with customer in real-time. This brings us back to the customer journey and providing value at each stage.
Combining agile marketing, real-time marketing and integrated data, you can optimize offers based on the customer stage but also in the moment.
Website visitors have dropped by 50% in the past 24 hours, are there any offers we can push based on the terms people are searching for on Google?
One of our competitors has just been acquired, can we push out some promoted posts to capitalize on the increased attention in the market?
Having the right data and technology in place is crucial but your team need to be incentivized to work quickly and smartly because opportunities don’t hang around for long.
44% of companies benefit from greater social media effectiveness [from real-time marketing]— Immediate Future
5. Make smarter investments
How many times have you heard “We didn’t have enough time” or “the deadline was too tight”?
As marketers, we are constantly fighting against the clock and that’s unlikely to change.
What you can change though it the time you waste dipping in an out of disparate tools and sources.
Have a connected and comprehensive view on your data means that you can consistently get a high-level overview of what’s going on.
This strategy will enable performance monitoring at all times. Data that previously sat in silos will now be put front and center meaning if something’s not working, you’ll know about it sooner rather than later.
It will allows you to be alerted to changes in performance almost immediately allowing you to make the necessary changes to optimize and guarantee consistent performance. It will reduces the information lag and increases the speed to insight.
Given digital media budgets are to increase by 82% in the next 12 months, marketers need to be making the right investment if they want to prove ROI. By the law of marginal gains, if you optimizing and improved each area by at least 1% on a consistent basis, you are on track for a gold medal.
This information shouldn’t be reserved to the marketing team, it has organizational-wide reach.
Marketing and customer insights can provide value to numerous teams in the business and can help align the organization on the importance of the customer voice.
6. Look beyond traditional sources and successes
Brands are never remembered for good marketing.
It’s the ground-breaking, innovative and creative marketing that goes down in history.
The beauty of an integrated data approach is that by optimizing other areas of your marketing, your team will have more time to think outside the box and apply previous successes and learnings in meaningful way.
Take Spotify’s 2016 campaign, which perfectly leveraged content, tone and channel. The campaign highlighted a selection somewhat bizarre Spotify listener habits and put them front and center on billboards across the US.
This exhibited a powerful understanding of their customer and audience but more importantly, creatively leveraged the data they had at hand.
The success of this campaign was not down to luck, but clever data-driven marketing.
The more you champion a data-driven and integrated approach for your team the easier it will be to raise the bar of what you can achieve.
There is no one-size fits all approach but by having the basis in place it will be easier to evolve as you go.
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