I started off 2016 by cleaning my desk. It felt so good to remove last year’s papers that I moved on to my filing cabinets and finally even tackled my hard drive. Which makes me wonder: how many marketers are starting out the New Year by cleaning and organizing their data? I hope most.
With data-driven decision making at the top of most marketers’ resolution list for 2016, it’s time to address the question of what data is valuable to your enterprise. Are you using all the data available to your organization about your customers? Are your data up-to-date? Are disparate databases linked together to give you one view of the customer? Have you filled in missing data with high-quality third-party data?
For many, just getting access to current and comprehensive customer data is still a problem. Having the time and resources to clean, enhance and organize data to derive actionable insights in a timely manner too often seem like an analyst’s pipedream.
Analysts and researchers know that the quality and coverage of data are the single biggest factors in the accuracy and effectiveness of analytics. What kind of model, which outcome to measure, what software to use—all are important considerations. But experience and testing show that the biggest determinant of good analytics is good data. And the biggest barrier to ensuring quality inputs to our decision making process is corporate culture.
This is where the C-suite must step in. Organizations need to adopt a data-driven culture. The data geeks and modellers know what to do and the marketers know the questions that need to be answered. But it’s only corporate leadership that can tackle the barriers and resistance that stand in the way of assets being shared across an organization. Enterprise policies regarding data gathering, storage and access are intended to protect consumer data, but they also must ensure compliant and responsible use by those who access the data. Sharing across siloes is essential to understand cross-sell and up sell opportunities, but too often the left hand of an organization doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
Contrary to marketplace mythology, there is no such thing as a “digital” customer as distinct from a “traditional” customer anymore—there never was, actually. There’s just “the customer” who researches, shops and engages with brands in many varied and complicated ways. Why do we have digital marketers and CRM managers in different divisions of an organization? Digital agencies, email providers, DM providers, media buyers— too often, these specialist work at cross purposes or, at the very least, collaborate only on small subsets of the total picture.
In this world where the customer is in charge of access to brand information, omni-channel marketing is the reality and engagement is the key to success, business leaders need to lead the charge for developing data resources that are high quality and accessible as well as protected and compliant. So ring out your old data policies and resolve to undertake a data audit and set up a data governance group that crosses siloes. Make it your team’s objective to use quality data to better know and delight your customers. Your success in 2016 depends on it.
Happy New Year.
Jan Kestle is the president and founder of Environics Analytics.
