Focus on Growth

The Marketing team is under ever greater pressure to demonstrate fast and tangible return on investment. According to the latest Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and Bloomberg Marketing Confidence Monitor, many businesses are heading into 2014 with “aggressive” growth ambitions:

Growth now dominates the management agenda (50%). Increase in management buy-in and more appetite for investment in innovation and new business practices, products and people (42%).

So how are marketers planning to respond? The Digital Marketing Insights Report 2014, based on research undertaken by MyCustomer.com on behalf of Teradata and Celebrus Technologies, provides insight into the way marketing and analytics practitioners across Europe perceive digital customer data capture, storage, analytics and personalisation opportunities, the challenges and expected benefits in improved engagement and conversion over the next two years.

Digital Marketing Priorities

Given this fast changing environment where both consumer expectation and brand engagement opportunities continue to evolve, what is driving today’s marketers? How sophisticated are current strategies for exploring and exploiting these vast quantities of digital data? And what benefits are being gained in the key areas of personalisation and real-time response?

According to the survey results, the more traditional aspects of email (58%) and search marketing (57%) remain top priorities. However, given the new insights into customer preferences and sentiment being delivered by social data, it is no surprise that social media marketing is gaining ground fast (52%). It is, however, unexpected to see that mobile marketing is a priority for just 27% of respondents. Companies are also looking at the bigger picture, with over a quarter (27%) citing Big Data collection and analysis as a key priority for 2014 .

While this may appear a relatively low figure given the huge media attention on Big Data, in practice, there is a significant recognition amongst marketers of the importance of collecting and storing multichannel information.

While only 21% have a Single Customer View (SCV) today – a massive 57% expect to achieve the SCV in two years. The value from detailed customer insight is driving marketing innovation.

Data Collection Imperative

There is a clear recognition of the importance of the SCV in delivering better customer insight (70%) and improved marketing personalisation (60%). Furthermore, investment in marketing – and marketing technologies – is on the up, making it easier to commit to this development.

However, organisations admit there are obstacles to achieving key objectives such as the SCV, most notably time (50%), department silos (46%) and technology (44%).

The diversity of digital customer data alone makes it hard to capture e.g. consumer behavioural data from websites, mobile apps, streaming and social media across multiple devices by one individual – let alone the likes of machine to machine data including video surveillance, smart meters and GPS.

It’s all about Data

Digital data is expected to double every two years. Yet only a small proportion of this data today is being captured and analysed. The challenge is not purely data volume, as Gartner’s 3 V’s of Big Data reveals:

• High Volume with data set to reach 40 trillion GB by 2020
• Comes in a Variety of formats, including text strings, images, web logs, documents and numeric data across a diversity of formats and sources.
• This is data in motion, constantly changing at high Velocity - and data relevance can decay rapidly.

The Digital Marketing Insight Report reveals the biggest data challenges facing marketing teams

The diversity of digital data makes it difficult for most to achieve effective capture, storage and analysis with traditional technologies.

Data Collection Imperative

Today, organisations are barely scraping the surface of the digital data potential. Aggregated web data is the primary source of digital data (70%) alongside CRM, transactional and demographic data (around 50%). Yet without timely individuallevel digital customer data it is impossible to build the essential 360 degree customer view: it is therefore no surprise that organisations are struggling to achieve the SCV while still relying on aggregated data.

The increasing maturity of inexpensive big data storage, such as Hadoop, allows organisations to capture, deploy, support, manage and seamlessly access all data, enabling them to move away from data silos and realise a true SCV.

Almost half (49%) expect to have moved away from data silos to a single centralised database in the near future.

Analytics Underpin ROI

Few organisations have yet to extend their use of analytics beyond web analytics into areas such as journey mapping, golden pathing and affinities analysis. This is due, in the main, to a lack of analytics expertise within the business; although companies also cite a lack of time and structural issues with data.

However, while 47% cite a lack of time as the main obstacle to achieving better analytics, internal skills and expertise are also a big issue for 37%. The value of customer analytics is becoming clear and to realise this value over half (51%) expect to have a dedicated in-house analytics team within the next two years.

Personalisation Imperative

It could be argued that 2014 will be the year personalisation becomes a prerequisite. Indeed, 56% of consumers say they would be more inclined to use a retailer if it offered a good personalised experience, according to O2’s The Rise of Me-tail study*. Considering that personalisation could lift sales by 7.8%, there is growing pressure on marketers to build a strong, omni-channel personalisation strategy.

Personalisation Imperative

Respondents to the Digital Marketing Insight Report agree: over half (51%) say personalisation is already either very important or critical to their efforts today.

Personalisation Imperative

These results are being achieved by organisations that are just beginning to explore personalisation:

However, this is set to change radically over the next two years. Not only do companies plan to embrace website and mobile personalisation, but over three quarters (78%) of respondents predict that they will be making use of data in real-time for personalisation by 2016.

Consumers will see a radical change in the way brands approach engagement over the next two years with real-time personalisation in particular on the increase.

Transforming Business in Practice

Shop Direct has captured granular level web interaction data and incorporated it within an Single Customer View to more accurately measure specific customer actions – such as abandoned shopping baskets, browsing but not purchasing and switching from web to phone interactions to complete purchases.

These insights are driving value to the business in activities such as:

• Customer targeting – by identifying which consumers engage with paper-based publications and those for whom it’s a waste of budget.
• Personalisation – by pin-pointing which products to promote to which individual within an email, via a website, or even through a call centre conversation.
• Customer behaviour analysis – comparing online behaviour against offline customer and shopping habit marketing data to check out and validate its value proposition.
• Marketing attribution – using data about all individual customer visits to build a clear picture of the value of campaigns and specific keywords in driving in driving revenue.

Realising the DataDriven Digital Vision

As the Digital Marketing Insight Report results reveal, Marketers are committed to meeting changing consumer demands for real-time, personalised conversations. However, given the stated challenges associated with lack of time, data silos and internal analytics skills, what is the best way to achieve the key objectives?

Put the Right Foundations in Place

Five steps to getting the right foundations in place for data-driven marketing are:

1. Create a cross-functional team, including marketers, analysts and IT, to gain in-depth understanding of data requirements and embark upon data capture. Each job function brings a different way of thinking, skill-set and methodology to the team which strengthens and deepens overall thinking.
2. Don’t be scared of detailed data, it is just another data source. Create a strong data foundation with the highly granular data you need to engage today’s omni-channel consumers and then get stuck in and start using it.
3. Integrate data in a technology stack that supports the bringing together of multiple data sources for the creation of a Single Customer View. With the growth of lower cost storage technologies and unified architectures this data integration is easier to achieve nowadays.
4. Exploit analytics and move beyond reporting to creating real insight, including individual customer journey analytics and marketing attribution. Start simple, use test and learn to gain understanding and confidence, and feedback into the iterative process.
5. Once you have confidence and experience in a range of analytics you can embark upon ever more sophisticated personalisation and real-time activity.

With the right data and analytics foundation, marketers can explore new opportunities, from product affinity to behavioural targeting and social CRM.

Celebrus Technologies & Teradata Partnership

As the research reveals, organisations recognise the value of understanding individual customer journeys as they interact across a multitude of different channels. For digital marketers this requires not only the tools to capture these interactions, but also the technology and skill-sets to analyse this data to achieve insight and drive actions.

This new digital data world requires a highly innovative, flexible and responsive approach:

• Un-aggregated, lowest level data
• Scalability.
• Advanced analytics to enable ‘discovery’ and answer complex queries
• Ability to integrate heterogeneous data.
• Fast, real-time processing capability.

Exciting Data-Driven Future

The ‘always on – always connected’ consumers of today are demanding more engaging and relevant content from brands and organisations. As the Digital Marketing Insights Report reveals, Marketers increasingly acknowledge the importance of a data-centric approach to Marketing. There is a strong recognition of:

• The need for a Single Customer View.
• The importance of analytics.
• The value of data powered personalisation.
• The power of real-time information.

With organisations clearly planning to invest significantly in data collection, storage, analytics and marketing execution in the next two years, the outlook is positive and exciting. Growing numbers of Marketers will, for the first time, be able to continuously listen and piece together a 360 degree view of customer interactions across all touch points; interpret these signals; create new insights and take appropriate actions…all in realtime.