From not enough data to continuous growth: How can marketing automation help?

Mani Gopalaratnam

Category

from-not-enough-data-to-continuous-growth

Summary

Conquering data and logistics hurdles is necessary for a streamlined digital CX.
Dedicated tools (such as a CDP) can consolidate your customer digital trails.
Dedicated tools (such as a CDP) can consolidate your customer digital trails.

Overcoming data limitations

Sustainable business growth is driven by big data and frictionless digital customer experience. This is fast becoming a prerequisite for organizations across the world. However, implementing it in practice can seem like a daunting task. Further complicating matters is that many organizations are still figuring out their data paradigms.

Too much of it, or too little of it.
Silos that complicate effective distillation.
Systems and processes incapable of extracting any measurable value from the data.

To get from point A—the tangle of data as it exists in the organization—to point B—continuous growth paired with effective marketing transformation—is a must. But how?

The CDP solution

Data-focused systems, such as a CDP, or integrated marketing automation solutions with a robust data core always start by consolidating, validating, and gleaning all the data. The goal here is to strengthen the data structure, to make it actionable—with minimal or no hurdles for the key steps that follow.

For most, a mere sorting through the data they have is far from enough. They need to augment it, which means capturing additional attributes to enrich your understanding of an audience or object. This is a gradual process, one guided and managed by marketing automation solutions that can uncover and centralize those presently unavailable, but crucial data points, over time. How do these solutions achieve this? They augment data by capturing new information from interactions across relevant channels and sources.

Turning digital footprints to insights that matter

It is well-known that consumers leave behind a trail of signals and insights waiting to be picked up and pieced together by brands. The scale of this has mushroomed in the last few years, accelerated by technological advancements. The job of the marketer is to unify such footprints and use them to understand the customer behind it all:

Within regulatory boundaries.
With consideration for the individual’s privacy.
For the purpose of delivering relevant experiences.

Audience identity resolution is an essential capability for all channels and systems. It tracks the unknown visitor’s path across digital touch points, maps out their evolution towards becoming customers, and enables the creation of communications specific to different points of their journey.

How can organizations generate top-line impact from this?

They need to utilize the data, with the help of marketing automation systems, to send the right communication for each customer at the right time and place, all while facilitating their individual journeys by acting contextually and in real time.

For example, it doesn’t make sense for a recent college graduate to receive the same promotions and interactions as a retiree enjoying their time in a resort town.

With the data layer taken care of, organizations can delineate the diversity of audience groups relevant to their business growth. Using audience identity resolution, they can go even further, responding to preferences, inclinations, and patterns of individual customers, dynamically adjusting how they are engaged over time as they evolve in relation to marketing communications and relevant contexts.

Insights, actions and benefits

All these insights should be immediately translated to consistent, seamless engagement across touchpoints. This entails significant improvements in productivity, as much of the guesswork in digital marketing is eliminated, while complicated tasks are automated and optimized for scale. In short, organizations will spend time creating, and benefiting from, communications that are more precisely targeted than ever before.

These benefits encompass reach, engagement, retention, and all the way to advocacy. They are the outcomes of the holistic approach towards marketing transformation that martech solutions have been adopting for organizations worldwide. By uncovering audience intelligence across business units or brands, certain solutions are enabling organizations to cross/up-sell much more effectively.

Conclusion

The path towards digital marketing transformation is a long climb. It requires significant planning, collaboration, and commitment. It demands organizations to shed dated processes, overcome challenges that are growing in scale by the day, and embrace a wider range of marketing possibilities. However, with the right marketing automation solution, walking the journey with assurance is very much doable!

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