As a CMO, you want to know which channels and campaigns are delivering the best results, how customers are interacting with your website or behaving in your stores, or how to give them personalised recommendations when visiting your site. The leaders in the field, like Amazon and Ocado, are all basing their success on being "data driven".
And hard research backs up those statements. A survey from Experian Data Quality found that data-driven businesses can increase overall sales by up to 30%, while a lack of good quality data is undermining customer service in 75% of companies. Another piece of research, by MIT's Centre for Digital Business, showed data-driven businesses enjoy profits that are 6% higher than average for their sector.
But for many Marketing leaders, data becomes their biggest nightmare rather than their greatest opportunity. To do proper ROI reporting you have to look at multiple systems to get a full picture; fetch data from many different places and load it into your own spreadsheets to get the answers you need; and wait too long for the analysis.
A new generation of modern, cloud-based data analytics solutions can change all that. These solutions make it easier for you to:
Collect, combine and work with all your data in one place
With all your data in one place, you can quickly and easily access the data you need, no matter what question you want to ask. You don't need to spend time pulling data out of different systems and getting it into in shape before you can use it. You don't need to worry about whether you're working with the latest data. And you don't need to move your data somewhere else — such as into a spreadsheet or a reporting tool — before you can run your analysis.
Handle large amounts of data — at speed
Cloud-based data analytics solutions can store millions of gigabytes of data, run complex queries across large subsets of your data in seconds, and automatically and instantly scale as you add more data. That means you can get the answers you need quickly and you don't need to switch to another system if you want to run a different kind of report. Cloud-based data analytics is also essential if you have ambitions to use time-sensitive streaming data to support predictive pricing or to provide "live" product recommendations and content streams closely tailored to customers' interests.
Import, clean and transform data — automatically and reliably
The answers you get from your marketing analysis are only ever as good as the data you use. But data straight from the source isn't always in the best shape. It may contain errors, data may be missing, or it may include a few unusual extreme values that would skew your results. A data analytics solution provides you with tools to not only quickly and easily connect you, but also help you get it in the right shape for you to work with. You can import data as often as necessary, whether that's in a weekly or daily batch, every couple of hours or minutes, or continuously in real-time. And it will allow you to build a "single customer view": a complete picture of a customer's interactions and activity using data coming from different sources.
Use advanced analytics to take your marketing to the next level
Advanced analytics based on machine learning — a kind of artificial intelligence — will allow you to get even more value out of your data. You can use it to:
- predict customer lifetime value to identify which channels and campaigns are delivering high spending and profitable customers
- segment customers more accurately so you can target campaigns and offers where they'll have most impact
- create more personalised experiences to increase engagement and reduce churn
- provide customers with more relevant product recommendations or social and media content
- use sentiment analysis of social media content to help manage brand reputation
Even a few years ago, these tactics were out of reach of all but the largest organisations. A new generation of tools is allowing teams with limited machine learning expertise to build sophisticated applications, but good results still depend on having high-quality data and lots of fast and powerful computing resources. So a modern data analytics solution is an essential foundation if you want to take your marketing to the next level.
Provide actionable insights to drive decision making
All the data and technology in the world won't help if you can't get actionable insights when you need them. That's why a modern data analytics solution will include tools that allow you to visualise your data in ways that go beyond traditional tabular reports and charts — and remain fast and responsive no matter how much data you're working with.
For digital marketing agency and Ancoris customer QiH Group, a modern data analytics solution based on Google Cloud has transformed its ability to deliver marketing campaigns for each of the brands it works with. Reports that used to take up to ten minutes to produce now run in seconds, and users are improving the reliability of data pipelines which means users have greater confidence in the results. The company can now add data from new marketing channels or spin up reporting for an entirely new client in a matter of hours. And moving forwards, QiH Group now has a solid foundation for adding advanced analytics to handle tasks such as predicting customer lifetime value.
The benefits of a modern data analytics solution are clear — but deploying one can seem a daunting prospect. That's why we've put together our CMOLab solutions. They make it easy to bring together and analyse your own data so you can tackle two key challenges.
- With Ancoris CMOLab Marketing Spend Optimisation, you can make the most of your marketing spend by tracking marketing KPIs and ROI in real time.
- With Ancoris CMOLab Recommendation Engine, you can give customers more of what they love by suggesting products based on their preferences.
Get in touch with our Data, Analytics and AI team to find out more.
