The Marketers’ Pursuit of Data in 2016

It’s the end of 2015. The marketing landscape continues to heat up. Marketers are scrambling to find solutions that give them the insights they need. Some attempt to build their own platform and hire a team of developers to do the job. Others put various analytics tools together and attempt to identify patterns. Yet many speak of an omni-channel marketing strategy. What does the (near) future hold?

 

Research results

PerformanceIN and BrandHook’s “Advertiser Survey 2015” surveyed the progress of advertisers within the performance marketing landscape this year. Among some very interesting insights are:

• Data management platforms are popular: 54% is using one, 16% is looking for one in the next 12 months.
• 76% feel that there is a lot more that could be done with customer data to ensure campaigns are as effective as possible.
• 57% feel that there is a lot of discussion but little action around last-click attribution.
• 87% percent of all advertisers want to manage partners directly in the next five years.

 

Gartner’s “Predicts 2016: IT Leaders Need a More Agile Approach to Support Marketing” conducted a prognosis of marketing technology for the next year and indicated the following challenges:

• Many large companies have 50 or more different marketing applications from different vendors. (!)
• Many acquisitions remain as silos and separate divisions of the acquired organization, with limited integration and a variety of different deployment and pricing models.
• Marketing budgets are not growing at the same rate as the number of potential ways to communicate with the customer. Therefore, allocating and optimizing marketing budgets based on marketing performance metrics is more important than ever.
• Speed and organisational agility of both business and IT departments are needed to test new ideas and innovations to keep pace with market changes.

 

What this means for businesses

Businesses will continue to desire an omni-channel strategy, that’s for sure. With the introduction of the Internet of Things, more interactions are going to take place. Therefore, more data will be created, more data will need to be collected and analysed – which brings us to the next point.

While increasing number of companies acquire data management platforms, it is important to look for ways to consolidate these technologies together onto a single platform. The integration of isolated platforms, also commonly known as “data silos”, is beyond the scope of marketing. The competitive landscape has gotten so saturated that it is no longer good enough to have a good product and be good in marketing. Marketers need speed and agility in responding to the market, and they need it right away. There needs to be more organisational collaboration, including areas such as finance, IT and product. Working in sync means smoother workflows and a quicker customer acquisition process. The technology provider selected also needs to work on an agile development process. It needs to be able to accept and react to users’ feedback just as quickly, in order to keep up with the market.

Of course, collecting data is a hot topic. But the data collected also needs to be managed. Does your data have “digital resilience”? This term was coined by McKinsey, and it determines how your data is protected against attacks. This topic is recently more heavily discussed thanks to the latest Safe Harbor disagreements. Perhaps you should ask yourself the following questions: Does your company own your business data? Do you manage it in compliance with data protection laws? Is your business data secure?