For many marketers, 2016 represented the year that data finally took over from creativity as the driving force behind modern marketing. Faced with more customer data than ever before, marketers have struggled to construct an accurate view of their customers, instead being intimidated by the sheer volume of information available to them. Yet while this explosion of available data has proved a near-insurmountable beast for many marketers to overcome, it is the first of many obstacles facing marketers as we move into 2017.

To better understand these challenges, we launched the “Mythical beasts of marketing” report, surveying over 200 B2C marketers to find out which of their own marketing strategy and marketing technology “beasts” they believe will need to be overcome in 2017. Based on this research, here are the top four that marketers must conquer to make the most of their customer data.

1. Single customer view

Of all the challenges facing marketers, creating a Single Customer View was flagged as the thing that keeps marketers awake at night most of all. While many marketers have already mastered the unification of customer data, the majority are forced to manage this data in silos, lacking the knowledge needed to bring their various and fragmented customer touch points (email, social, point-of-sale, e-commerce and subscriptions) together.

According to the research, 62% of marketers are concerned by such data silos and the potential number of duplicates that exist in their data sets. Of respondents, 82% also feel that they are not yet able to bring multiple data sources together into a 360-degree customer view, (despite such a view being regarded as one of the greatest sources of ROI for the marketing department). If marketing is going to survive at the board level, in 2017 marketers will need to integrate their efforts – working together to build a more effective understanding of customers.

2. Accessing quality data

Accessing quality data remains the most fundamental problem that marketers must face in 2017. Confronted with so much information, marketers are still struggling to distinguish the important information from the noise cluttering up their data sets. This year, 54% of marketers rated poor data quality as a key reason for their failure to provide targeted marketing campaigns. All of the necessary data is there, marketers just don’t know how to break it down or process it on such a large scale.

Looking to the year ahead, marketers should put renewed effort into improving the quality of their data. Removing duplicates, enhancing their existing data and ensuring compliance is crucial not just for more relevant, personalised and successful marketing campaigns, but to make sure that the personal data they hold on customers will conform to stringent new laws within the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation, in 2018.

3. Cross-journey optimisation

Before they can achieve an effective Single Customer View, marketers must be able to follow their customers across multiple channels and marketing campaigns in order to create a more complete profile of their customers, and maintain a seamless experience. Rarely do today’s consumers embark a single, linear customer journey, often skipping from device to device, browsing in store then buying online, sometimes the other way around. As a result, the sales cycle has never been more complicated. Marketers need to address this and find a way to optimise their journeys in order to best maximise ROI. While well over half of marketers say that they would like to implement some form of cross journey optimisation into their marketing strategy, there are still 66% of marketers who are yet to do so. Until marketers overcome this beast they will never develop an effective Single Customer View, ultimately limiting their customer conversion and online. ROI.

4. Skilling up

As a marketing skillset, data analytics is now considered more important than knowledge of social media, web development, graphic design and SEO. While it’s clear that marketers want to increase their knowledge of data analysis, at the same time they don’t really want to have to transform into data scientists. Instead, most marketers want to spend their time doing what they’re good at – being creative and managing campaigns. The result is that marketers still feel the need to pass most of their data analysis over to the IT department, or even outsource it to external data agencies at an unnecessary cost. In 2017 this needs to change – marketers are closest to customers and will be the best suited to analysing their data. Luckily as new tools come in, the process of analysing this data in-house is becoming more accessible to those with developing analytical knowledge, with the technology already readily available to refine a data-driven process.

Overall, data management is fundamental in modern marketing and marketers are finally starting to accommodate this by really getting to know their customers. However, there’s still a long way to go in 2017. When used correctly, customer data is a great resource for marketers, but it can only be used to its full potential by knowing it inside and out. Marketers need to take the time to really get to know their customers, combining data from multiple sources to create a better, long-term, data-driven approach.

 

By Anthony Botibol, group marketing director at BlueVenn

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