How to Overcome Data Challenges in Business

Let’s just get right down to it.

Want to understand your customers better? Start with your data.

Want to know what's working and why? Look at your data.

Want to set three, five, and seven-year goals for your business? Invest in your data.

Want to empower your teams with confidence to make better, more proactive decisions? Get your data foundation right.

Data-driven strategies start and end with reliable and actionable data and the tools, processes and teams to turn that data into information.

CMO Data Goals

Most CMOs want data embedded in every strategic decision; data that optimizes every process, work product and customer experience; and real-time visibility into spent budgets and outcomes generated by every dollar. They also tell me that they want to use AI and automation to replace manual efforts so that their people may focus on the truly human and creative side of business. Oh, and it would be great to have clarity across every team, division, tool and process to understand what really drives progress.

Data-Driven Strategies Are What Move Businesses Ahead

If your business has any of these data priorities in place, you’re way ahead of most competition.

Everyone says that they are data-driven, but as soon as you start asking questions you start to find a an inconsistent approach to using data, at best.

We’re talking about data so let’s look at some data. Only 53% of marketing decisions are influenced by marketing analytics so clearly not everyone is data driven. This does not need to be the case since CMOs have enormous amounts of data to measure every interaction and customer signal and yet they’re not fully using it to inform important strategic decisions.

Worse yet, a recent survey of CMOs found that 33% said decision-makers in their company cherry-pick their data to try to tell a story that aligns with their preconceived decision or opinion. They’re using data to validate the direction they want to go in, rather than listening to the contrary signals.

Most companies face significant challenges when it comes to truly unlocking the full potential of data-drive strategies. It's been said that data is a new currency and it is arguably a business’s most important and unique asset.

As global competition impacts products and services every day, businesses differentiate themselves by delivering more value and deepening customer loyalty otherwise, it becomes all about price and a race to the bottom.

Data can tell you how to deliver greater efficiency for teams, value to customers and deepen loyalty along the way.

Let's look at three common pitfalls where "data-driven" executives fail to unlock their data's full potential.

Living With Data Silos

In the past, our tech stacks were more all-encompassing, however today, there are software and solutions for every need.?

The proliferation of technology across all aspects of our business has both brought us closer together and further apart.

This fragmentation wreaks havoc on accessing, standardizing, analyzing and using data-driven strategies effectively. It leads to duplicated efforts, inconsistencies and errors, and it eliminates the effective use of automation, and full-funnel attribution.

Customer experiences become fragmented at a time when delivering a personal, relevant and seamless experience is expected by every customer.

While we're talking data, most CMOs recognize the issues with 35% of surveyed marketers saying they struggle with poor technology integrations, 83% of executives acknowledge they have data silos and 97% believe those silos are negatively impacting business.

Siloed data causes pain and inefficiency for both the internal teams responsible for delivering valuable customer experiences and executives responsible for proactive decision-making and the overall health of the company.

Ofter You're Served Data When You Really Need Information

So many marketing KPIs measure an outcome but tell you nothing helpful about the factors that led to that outcome. Many organizations have endless amounts of data but very little information. Most of their data is unorganized and has no inherent meaning on its own.

Without intervention, data offers no context and is a poor and misleading tool for understanding past performance and driving decision-making.

Information brings processed and organized data into a meaningful context. It's purposeful and comes from contextual analysis. It's the "why" to the raw data's "what." It is the "why" that is necessary to make proactive decisions and forecasts. Data is easy to come by, information requires effort.

To gain full value from your data, it must be organized, contextualized, analyzed and turned into valuable information to support decisions and drive your business forward.

Finding the Skills and Creating a Data Foundation

If it was easy to set up, manage, and maximize data across increasingly complex business landscapes, nearly everyone would do it. Getting data right is hard and requires an investment in a particular set of skills and tools.

Competition to hire that specific skillset is high and 80% of employers globally report difficulty finding the skilled talent they need. IT and data skills are top of list for the most desired skills. If you are a small or mid sized business or a business of any size that simply faces constraints, what can you do?

You can:

• Work with a partner to set up your data infrastructure for your team to maintain.
• Work with a partner to both set up your data infrastructure and manage data integrations, data health, executing reporting, visualizations and more.
• Train your teams in data literacy.

Hiring the right people with the right skillset solves one challenge, but you must empower those team members with a secure and scalable data practice to connect, cleanse, standardize, normalize, automate, visualize and act on your data.

First Things First, Build the Right Data Foundation

Start with the following:

1. Replace legacy systems with modern, integrated technology to connect your data sources across platforms and processes for a single, unified view. Take advantage of cloud solutions for robust security and flexibility, without legacy tool siloes. You can then act on your data to trigger everything from marketing outreach to predictive churn models to AI intelligence.
2. Establish data governance.?Take the time to set a solid data governance process to ensure accuracy, standardization, consistency and compliance across all teams.
3. Secure data privacy to protect your customers and overall business. Set clear data processes, build secure systems, restrict access to need-to-know team members, and always comply with data privacy regulations (such as GDPR and CCPA) to protect customer data privacy.
4. Double down on customer loyalty. Focus on customer loyalty to capture increasing amounts of first-party data to fuel better customer targeting and improve digital experiences.
5. Promote a culture of testing and experimentation.?This will allow you to continuously gain more data about customers' preferences and motivations.
6. Get help when you need it. These skill sets are hard to come by and if your data infrastructure and supporting technology is put together ineffectively, you're wasting time, budget and opportunity on unreliable or unactionable data insights.

Overcome data challenges by investing in the right infrastructure, modernizing systems, setting data governance processes, focusing on security measures, and empowering your teams with data literacy training and the corporate blessing to test-and-learn along the way to your data-driven strategies.

You don't need to go at it alone. Find the right partners to supplement your team's data analytics skills and help you integrate and set up a solid and secure data infrastructure. A solid digital adoption partner is a great place to start.