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15 August, 2019

Why Marketers Need A Single Source Of Truth In The Age Of Data-Driven Marketing

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With Australian businesses showing their desire to spend big on data, a ‘single source of truth’ is required to lead the way, explains Datorama (a Salesforce company) CMO Leah Pope (pictured below).

Marketers have come a long way in how they make decisions about how to best connect with customers. However, technological advancement has meant that marketers now have access to real-time data, enabling them to engage in even more meaningful interactions with customers and drive profitability. We’ve already seen a large investment in data-driven decision-making here in Australia, with IDC revealing that businesses likely spent as much as $2.7 billion on building analytics capabilities in 2018.

However, while data is the heartbeat of modern marketing, the age-old saying of “too much of a good thing” is no exception here. Marketers today are flooded with an insurmountable volume of data and keeping track of it all is a problem in itself. In fact, IDC predicts that the global ‘datasphere’ will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 61 per cent to 175 zettabytes by 2025. This presents both an opportunity for the data-driven marketer, as well as a challenge.

More data, more opportunities… and problems

Marketers today face many challenges, but the biggest of them all is the lack of a single source of truth to understand their performance data holistically. The modern marketer uses a multitude of channels, platforms, and touchpoints to connect with customers, whether that’s while customers are scrolling through their social media feeds, or simply searching on Google. As a result, marketers are required to collect dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of disparate data streams to understand their campaign performance and customer engagement.

This fractured data landscape proves to be a challenge when attempting to construct a holistic view of marketing performance to maximise return on investment (ROI) and growth while delivering exceptional customer experiences. And without a single source of converged customer data, marketers lack crucial transparency into the input-output flow of all their marketing investments. This also means marketers are spending more time aggregating data rather than gaining insight from it.

Marrying technological solutions to business goals is the key

Marketers need to take a ‘Marketing Intelligence’ (MI) approach to connecting with customers. Enter the growth marketer, a marketer who embraces MI solutions to enable transparency, speed and growth across their organisation, impacting top-line business goals through daily decisions and long term strategy.

Leah Pope _Headshot (002) The result is that marketing becomes directly connected to broader business growth outcomes and associated KPIs. Growth mandates need to be operationalised across the organisation – which requires a measurement system that ladders up all the way from campaign and creative performances to the business performance KPIs needed at the executive level.

Driving business growth through connected marketing insights

One example of a company that brings this concept to life is Ticketmaster, which brings live experiences to fans worldwide, with almost 500 million ticket transactions a year. Ticketmaster has thousands of client campaigns to manage every month. A company operating on a massive scale such as this needs to ensure it’s making smart decisions on campaigns in the span of weeks, even days, leading up to an event.

Ticketmaster is able to do this by connecting data from any source and format across channels, campaigns, placements, and creatives, enabling a holistic view of the entire customer journey. By arming internal teams with a way to not only track top-line KPIs by client and campaign, but also optimise at any level of granularity.

This gives Ticketmaster both the speed to insights and the transparency needed to directly tie marketing activities to every other department of the business, including finance teams that need to accelerate billing cycles to realise revenue quickly and efficiently. As a result, Ticketmaster has been able to connect over 300 marketing and sales data sources, resulting in 30 per cent revenue growth and campaign KPI performance, and can now confidently run 2000 campaigns per month, while saving up to 120 hours.

Marketers who are able to work off of a single source of truth are able to make smarter decisions about how to best connect with their customers, by utilising real-time data analytics. The future of marketing requires a modicum of transparency between all departments, and intelligent solutions will be fundamental in helping companies achieve this.

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