Data Driven Marketing The Reality

Years back in 2009 I did my first marketing project where we built a custom marketing tool.The objective of the tool was to deliver personalized promotional emails, to be able to track the response of potential customers and to use the collected response to enhance the next email campaign.Pretty standard right ?

Using data like customer attributes, their buying potential, response to a specific campaign etc. to trigger marketing campaigns. That is Data Driving the...wait for it...Marketing !

But then, it has been this way for as long as we can remember.Then what is the buzz around Data Driven Marketing ??

I have been pondering over this question for a while. Here are few important considerations from my perspective :

1) Data -  It starts with the data. Hands down - it does. The change over the years is that organizations are collecting more data than before.  Data collection includes deterministic data as well as behavioral data.  There is focus in identifying data attributes to be collected, the quality of data collected and the consent to utilize the data.

  2) 360 degree view -  Another set of buzzwords! Matter of fact - most of the organizations have collected information on various systems like sales, service, loyalty, commerce etc.  However they had never (/to a large extent not) unified the information.Teams and systems continued to function perfectly in isolation lacking the 360 degree view.That is one important change, considerable effort is being put in connecting the dots and getting a 360 degree view of potential buyers as well as existing customers.

3) Channels -  Omnichannel and Multichannel marketing is not new either.It is certainly another important pillar. The channels have grown over the years - onsite, offsite and includes third party. Ad Tech and Mar Tech is getting closer. E.g - A potential buyer walks into a car showroom and eventually sees Ads. Someone who looks at option to buy houses on the net - receives an email with offer to connect to a real estate agent and so on. The interesting thing is, the possibility to enable marketing on online channels using data collected offline and using data collected online to enable marketing/sales using offline channels.

4) Customer Experience -  Personalization is key to marketing. Remember the mantra 'Right content to the right person at the right time'.  It is but natural to use the information collected, to enhance targeting recipients in a way that the customer or potential customer's experience is more 1-1. The emails/the Ads/ the website/ (just about everything) designed for that one unique customer.

All of the four topics mentioned above are demands of new age marketing and my conclusion is that we have chosen to market it as Data Driven Marketing ;)

P.S - This is my independent view on the topic. If you are a marketer and see it differently, feel free to share your thoughts with me over a chat. I am happy to enhance my knowledge with your experience.