Data Is Your Competitive Advantage

Over the last decade, the difference between brands that have flourished and those that

haven’t boils down to one thing—data. Or more precisely, their ability to derive insights from data. Data has turned marketers from wordsmithing sloganeers into data-driven collaborators who can orchestrate the type of personalized, connected and empathetic experiences that consumers expect and that drive real business value.

The data-driven journey is now even more urgent following the upheaval from Covid-19. Consumers need brands to provide a sense of normalcy and marketers need to make sure every message that goes out is relevant and empathetic. On the business side, marketers are being called upon to look for ways to cut waste, increase efficiencies, measure performance and drive the type of customer relationships that lead to growth.

The conversation around data has always been noisy. It can be hard to figure out what trends and technologies are game changers and which ones are, for lack of a better word, a fad. You need to be able to answer questions like: What new technologies are worth investing in? Can AI really make a difference in my personalization strategy? How do I stay ahead of privacy regulations and build trust with consumers?

To help you thrive in the current environment, we have highlighted five data-driven marketing trends that truly matter today. Now we know it’s not the trends themselves that matter, but rather understanding where they’re going and what actions you can take to accomplish your goals.

1.  Data Unification and Identity

Current State

Creating an experience that can turn a prospect into a loyal customer, while building deeper relationships with existing customers hinges on your ability to identify consumers across devices, apps and browsers. The key to doing so is unifying all of your data into a master customer profile and connecting known and unknown data. This includes non-traditional data that sales or service teams might have generated. Since all of this data is coming from disparate sources, it’s critical that you onboard it into a single system where it can be harmonized, cleaned and deduped.

Known data comes from people you can identify—think customers or newsletter subscribers. Unknown data is generated by people you can’t easily identify, such as those who may drop into your website without logging in. By connecting the two along with sales and service data, you’ll be able to understand a customer’s unique behavioral trajectory across all touchpoints and deliver

exceptional personalized experiences (more on this later).

What’s Next

Think consumers’ expectations can’t get any higher?

Think again. As brands compete with each other to deliver even more exceptional experiences, they will raise the bar for what high-quality customer relationships can look like. To keep up, marketers will need to unify data from many different channels and leverage data management platforms (DMPs) that have evolved to focus on additional pseudonymous identifiers, such as customer IDs, and then combine this anonymous data with known profiles already in their customer data platforms (CDPs).

Entire organizations—not just marketing departments—will need to rally around a unified customer experience. Already, 81% of marketers surveyed by Salesforce said they share goals and metrics with sales colleagues and 80% indicated they do the same with customer service teams. This type of cross-departmental collaboration will become even more critical as consumers shift to more digital-first experiences.

Take Action

First things first: Evaluate your data sources. Work with colleagues in sales and customer service to identify where customer data is being stored outside of marketing. Identify sources sitting with outside agencies and other partners. It’s critical that you have a bird’s eye view of all customer interactions. From there, you’ll need to onboard any offline data into your master customer profile. To create an optimal experience, it’s critical that all data is accurate and continuously updated. Assign a team member to be the owner of this process. Having someone focused on managing and updating data will ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

2.  Journey Management

Current State

As touchpoints, data and channels proliferate, marketers are struggling to manage the customer journey in a way that both achieves their end goals and feels seamless to the customer. So, what does journey management look like for best-in-class marketers today? It’s overwhelmingly data-driven and dependent on having that single, unified view of the customer. Like other areas in the marketer’s purview, journey management has become an increasingly cross-departmental endeavor with marketers working hand-in-hand with sales and customer service to ensure advertising is coordinated with the rest of the customer journey.

What’s Next

Journey mapping must become as sophisticated as marketers’ ability to collect and analyze data. The continued adoption of AI will help with this as more marketers apply it to crafting ideal customer journeys.

The customer journey continues to move away from being siloed and linear into something that moves across channels and mediums. Because of this, marketers will put greater focus on omnichannel experiences and synchronizing online and offline channels. There has long been a disconnect between owned digital and in-store experiences, but this will change as organizations realign around the total customer experience. Remember, just because your company may treat, say, ecommerce and in-store as different channels doesn’t mean that customers see things that way.

Take Action

Start by mapping out the phases of your current customer journey and then drill down on the touchpoints within each phase. From there, work to put metrics behind them. For example, awareness could be quantified by new social media followers or branded search queries.

Next, step into the consumer’s shoes to see what the journey is actually like. Have your team members go through your channels as if they were a customer. What was navigating the website like? Were you retargeted post- purchase? Then adjust your strategy to fill in whatever holes you find.

Take this a step further by adding and testing touchpoints that work dynamically together. For example, you could run a promotion in tandem on email and your website and then add on an advertising campaign to really drive the message home.

 
3.  1:1 Targeting

Current State

1:1 targeting and communications have been a goal for marketers since Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote the One-to-One Future in 1993. It’s just now becoming a reality, thanks to advancements in technology and data management. So, what does a 1:1 strategy really look like? It’s founded on first-party data and contingent on having that single, unified view of the customer. With a cohesive understanding of a consumer’s intent, preferences and history, you’ll be able to drive campaigns and experiences that speak to a specific consumer’s needs and wants.

What’s Next

As 1:1 strategy progresses, advanced marketers will continue to push for real-time engagement and synchronization. Fortunately, this will become easier as AI and automation tools evolve. This includes dynamic messaging. For the first time, more than half of marketers surveyed for Salesforce’s State of Marketing report describe their cross-channel content as dynamic—up from less than a third in 2018.

Privacy regulations and increased consumer awareness of data collection will also drive marketers to focus more on providing value via data. If done well, high-quality personalized experiences will help convince consumers that there is real value in sharing their data.

Take Action

Once again, having a single view of a customer’s behavior is critical for 1:1 success. With that single view you can understand intent and historic preferences and begin to build campaigns that speak directly to a consumer’s most pressing needs. Conversely, you can suppress consumers from seeing ads that don’t apply to them. This will help reduce waste and home in on the segments most likely to take action.

4.  Privacy and the Post-Cookie World

Current State

Google’s decision to phase out third-party cookies by 2022 led to more than a few panicky headlines and doomsday predictions. Still, the writing has been on the wall for cookies for quite some time. For their part, leading marketers have been taking this move in stride and working harder than ever to protect and respect consumer privacy. A vast majority (81%) of marketers surveyed for Salesforce’s State of Marketing report agreed that their organization is more mindful of balancing personalization with customer comfort than they were two years ago.

What’s Next

Europe’s GDPR was the start of privacy regulation and California’s CCPA is now in force. Expect other states to adopt CCPA-like regulations in the near future.

It’s critical that you stay ahead of this by adopting a privacy-centric ethos. In practice, this means working with tools that allow your company to implement a scalable privacy policy that can adjust for different regulatory environments. Marketers will have to remain vigilant and ready to quickly shift audience and consent management frameworks to adapt to changing environments.

Take Action

There are two components to a successful privacy strategy—communication and technology. A crucial part of winning consumer trust is successfully communicating to consumers how, why and when you are collecting and using their data. Many consumers are willing to share their information if they’re comfortable with the value they receive in exchange. When it comes to technology, look for tools that put privacy first and that allow for high levels of adaptability and visibility.

Remember, the landscape is evolving and rather volatile, so it’s crucial to invest in tools that allow you to be agile in your consent framework.

5.  Evolved Measurement

Current State

As marketing budgets get tighter, it is more important than ever to gauge the performance of your campaigns. No organization can afford waste. In addition, the increased focus on the customer experience has changed how marketers view and measure success. The percentage of marketers tracking customer lifetime value and customer satisfaction metrics continues to increase and many are becoming more strategic about when and where they analyze certain metrics. For example, early on in the journey, marketers trying to drive brand awareness will focus on measuring customer satisfaction rather than leads generated. This helps teams to focus on small goals rather than getting overwhelmed with the big picture.

What’s Next

Marketers will continue to invest in marketing analytics to scale efficiency and prove ROI. Part of this is the slow phasing out of manual processes. So far, uncertainty around how to proceed has kept many from going all-in with automation, but that will likely change as organizations look to increase efficiencies wherever possible. It’s also likely that over the next 12-24 months those that haven’t jumped on board with AI will begin to adopt it and see benefits, shifting the baseline for what can be done with more advanced measurement systems. Last but not least, marketers will continue to search for and demand measurement tools that can provide real-time performance insight.

Take Action

The first step in evolving your measurement process is analyzing your current system and finding its weak points. What’s important to your business right now and how are your metrics helping you accomplish your goals? Do you have a test-and-learn capability and a mature marketing mix modeling capability? Investigate how and where AI and automation can fit into your stack. This is simpler than it sounds. Look at your most time-consuming processes—it’s more than likely that some parts of them can be automated.