Why Digital Transformation In Marketing Is All About The Data
In this opinion piece, D.Why founder and marketer David Yeats (pictured below) explains why it’s data that’s going to unlock his next market, and it’s data that’s going to keep his teams lean as markets grow and diversify.
I’m a dichotomy. I love the romance and the religion of brand. The narratives, the storytelling, the ideas and idealism. It’s what makes me tick and I could do it all day. But I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I didn’t at some point, in everything I do, ratify it back to the data.
Data is such a huge part of a marketer’s toolkit – in fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s today’s currency when it comes to acquiring customers. Loyalty programs exist to benefit the data pool, just as much as they exist for the customer (maybe more), website data and analytics are getting deeper and deeper and with the growth of Facebook as a marketing acquisition tool, the demographic data is starting to become valuable too.
But it’s not just about having the data. There are plenty of industries in the world right now sitting on mountains of data with absolutely no plan to make something useful out of them. So, what is this ‘currency’ good for then?
Digital transformation.
Data gives marketers speed
The first thing you see as you begin any digital transformation in marketing is the speed afforded by automation. Clever segmentation and automation pathways make marketing ‘happen’ with little or even no effort. In addition, these platforms provide dashboards and APIs to read the data and begin to make key decisions about content, successes, failures, and ROI.
Data gives marketers visibility
We’re already seeing it almost everywhere we go – the innovation movement and the market are asking us to change our relationship with failure. To proceed with focus and determination, but unromantic about the execution, ready to learn and move on the successes and rethink the parts that didn’t work. Visibility of data is driving the charlatans out of the room and bringing marketing technologists into power as a valuable part of any organisation.
AI will give data even more power
Let’s face it, there’s a great deal of grunt work in marketing. But as this strict process-driven task work becomes easier for computers to understand, the solutions will become faster and cheaper. Artificial intelligence (AI) will begin with the execution of what we call automation today, and will begin to move toward insights-driven decisions and machine learning.
Much like a forex trading platform, marketing can be tested, insights can be interpreted, campaigns adjusted – AI will do this without the need of a single human. As this happens over and over again, the segmentations become more and more complex, and AI is able to run personalised campaigns both deep and wide, simultaneously.
Machine learning will tip things on its head
Machine learning is an abstract concept to some. The idea that a computer can learn is easy to fathom, but hard to actually visualise until you realise the speed, depth and breadth of a computer’s processing capability.
Google translate just did a 180…
How is this relevant? Because Google brain and it’s “deep neural networks” is showing us just how powerful machine learning can be.
So, when it comes to marketing, as we move out of automation and into AI, as out data, metadata and real-time analytics give us more and more power, remember that there’s more around the corner. Computers with long short-term memory, mimicking human’s ability to retain and process complex and often unrelated information, and returning with new findings.
why digital transformation is important right now
It’s fun to think about the future, but it’s also easy to get stuck there and miss the call-out for what’s important to all of us today. As I said, I love the romance and storytelling of brand, but it’s data that’s going to further enable my ability to tell the right story. It’s data that’s going to unlock my next market, and it’s data that’s going to keep my teams lean as markets grow and diversify.
I like to liken this sort of thing to offence versus defence. Digital transformation can happen today, and there’s enough data to really play some serious offence in your market categories by increasing the rate of change in your organisation. Miss this window, however, and you’ll find yourself digitally transforming just to play defence – “keeping up with the Joneses”, so-to-speak.
Getting started today means your dashboards begin to mature as your insights do. Your automation is running pseudo-personalisation, your release frequency for content increases as you learn more about your customers, and the conversations around CMO versus CTO happen now, not later.
All of this is about digital readiness. How ready is your business or workplace for the changes that are coming? And more importantly, are you on the change curve somewhere, or are you lagging behind?
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