It’s no exaggeration to say that the marketing data landscape has changed quite a bit over the past couple of years. For one, the ways in which companies collect user data have been under the microscope, and the policies of apple i Google they force marketing data analytics changes across the board.
In addition, customers are more thoughtful than ever about what information they are willing to share and how it is used. Finally, scalability and personalization they’ve become buzzwords, but you can’t achieve this without solid analytics, and achieving this has been an uphill climb for many companies.
How are businesses succeeding in this new age of marketing? We talked to sellers of Cox Automotive i sobeys about charting their own paths and how they are finding ways to connect with customers in this complex landscape.
Here’s how these companies adapted their marketing data analytics to become more efficient and improve results along the customer journey.
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Table of contents
Rethink your marketing data analysis strategies
The movement toward protecting consumer privacy is accelerating, and that’s a good thing. However, the downstream effects of increased data collection restrictions mean several metrics, such as open rates and the measurement methods used to compare success are no longer reliable. For this, you will have to change your strategies.
As previous metrics of success become obsolete and customers become more experience-oriented, marketers realize how important it is to have a more complete view of campaign performance. Instead of evaluating marketing channels individually or in silos, they are evaluating the performance of all investments together as part of a unified strategy. Last year, 83% of sellers described theirs coordination between channels as a dynamic as opposed to silos or duplicates, up from just 68% in 2021.
Marketers are also more focused first party data — Information obtained directly from the client. Instead of relying on old systems like open data exchanges to buy audience data, they are modernizing the way they build first-party data assets through the lens of user consent.
Cox Automotive has spent the past two years building a more complete picture of prospects and customers, including combining role, engagement and product purchase data from all of its brands in one centralized location. Now, your teams can target specific audiences with personalized product or service messages.
By unifying its data, Cox Automotive can better segment its audience and deliver more personalized messages to its customers. It has value defined by segment and role so they have a clear idea of the problems they are solving and the messages they need to convey for each product.
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Use automation to free up time for smarter insights
Having a clear view of marketing data analytics is critical to a successful marketing strategy. And building a trusted database is the first step to executing that vision. Automation can handle minor tasks like data collection and segmentation, giving you a clear view of the information you need to make decisions.
Marketers are using a growing number of different platforms into your technology stack to advertise, engage customers, deliver better experiences, and ultimately get people to convert. This complexity often causes teams to spend too much time connecting and harmonizing data to create reliable insights instead of optimizing their efforts.
Instead of relying on a jumble of platforms, you can invest in automated data governance to relieve your teams of manual data aggregation. This includes managing campaign names and taxonomy, tracking requirements, data delivery and quality assurance.
A proper marketing intelligence platform makes data connections easy, with every click and no coding. With a platform that uses technology like automation and AI, you’ll spend less time preparing data and more time connecting with customers.
But it’s not just about connecting the data. Marketing intelligence helps harmonize it to create a coherent framework that enriches the raw data – helping you find useful information, rather than getting lost in a sea of data points. You can take it even further with automated taxonomy management, flexible reconciliation logic, and holistic data governance tools.
With an accurate database that evolves with the changing data ecosystem, you’ll move more efficiently and buy time for more testing and learning. The end result? Less time wasted trying to decipher inaccurate marketing data analytics, better return on your investment, and happier customers.
Turn insights into results with marketing data analytics
With cross channel access and first party data, you can measure customer-based results throughout an entire marketing journey. You can then use these insights to drive your marketing initiatives. For example, instead of focusing on top-funnel metrics like clicks and opens, marketers can optimize downstream results like signups and purchases.
Grocery chain Sobeys is using qualitative and quantitative data to improve the way it measures success throughout the customer lifecycle.
“What gets measured, gets done,” said Erika De Haas, vice president of marketing communications for Sobeys. “As we continue to build our connected experiences across the funnel, establishing clear benchmarks based on all the first-party data we have will be critical to not only connecting our experiences, but driving their impact and grow our loyal customer base.”
Sobeys’ strategy is to approach the sales funnel as a connected experience, with every interaction helping to build customer loyalty.
“At the top of the funnel we focus on what emotional benefits drive Canadian families to choose Sobeys. We research brand preferences and what matters most is brand ownership and equity,” said De Haas. “As that same customer moves through our funnel, we develop communications and experiences that deliver more functional benefits, and success is measured more in transactions.”
De Haas said Sobeys’ success will always be measured by the same metric: Is it providing families with what they need to keep choosing Sobeys as their place to shop? Now, the team has new tools to achieve this metric throughout the customer journey.
“Knowing if our customers engage with our brand at the top of the funnel but leave in the middle will require a different strategy than if they are engaged in the middle but leave in the store,” he says. “Tracking our data in a holistic way will be the difference maker that ensures we connect our customers with our brand throughout their journey with us.”
Connect with customers on your channels
Once you have your strategy, automation and insights in order, the next step is to put them together for start generating commitment on all your channels. This engagement generates more high-quality first-party data, which in turn leads to more data analysis, better insights, and even better engagements in the next round, as your data analytics operation becomes in a marketing power that is perpetuated and improved. .
The first step to getting there is to build connected customer journeys that guide each customer through relevant interactions on their preferred channels. This will mean different things to different companies; maybe for you it’s about increasing engagement in your customers’ inboxes or reaching them at the right time via SMS.
But regardless of the individual steps along the way, you can build the perfect journey from good strategy and clean data, with AI helping your customers along the way as a kind of invisible tour guide.
You can find more success in this journey if you have the intelligence to automate elsewhere. Using proprietary data instead of cookies allows you to get lower cost conversions. Automating the most basic customer communications saves time and frees up your salespeople to do more work.
All of this may seem like a lot to manage, but with the right smart reports and a connected dashboard, you can easily keep track of it all in one place. You can get the most out of your marketing data analytics when you let AI and automation take the guesswork out of it and let you focus on your customers.
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Originally published on Salesforce.com on September 27, 2023.
