The Challenge of Data-Driven Marketing

Many of today’s mar­keters belong to organ­i­sa­tions that are going through a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. It’s a sign of the times as more and more com­pa­nies are real­is­ing that most of their cus­tomers are online and the best way to reach them is through dig­i­tal channels.

Today’s cus­tomers are almost always con­nect­ed through mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal devices, and their expec­ta­tions of the kinds of expe­ri­ences they’re look­ing for have nev­er been high­er. A large part of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is get­ting to a place where cus­tomers are pro­vid­ed a rel­e­vant and per­son­alised expe­ri­ence, the kind that dri­ves the cus­tomer jour­ney toward point of pur­chase and inspires brand loy­al­ty. These kinds of expe­ri­ences don’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re the result of mul­ti­ple chan­nels of data tak­en togeth­er to devel­op a 360-degree view of the cus­tomers a com­pa­ny is try­ing to reach.

Although most com­pa­nies realise the cru­cial impact of data on their abil­i­ty to cre­ate per­son­alised cus­tomer expe­ri­ences, Seth Solomons, CEO of adver­tis­ing agency Wun­der­man, said in a recent inter­view with CMO.com, “We see a lot of clients strug­gling to get their arms around and under­stand their data. They want to make sense of it all, but many times they don’t have the skills inside their organ­i­sa­tion. It is very dif­fi­cult to trans­late their data into insights that inspire the ideas that dri­ve their con­sumers to action.”

Mag­ni­tude of data usu­al­ly isn’t a prob­lem for many organ­i­sa­tions. The data is there, but it’s often spread out and resides in many dif­fer­ent silos. Con­se­quent­ly, each chan­nel will col­lect its own data and have its own ideas for how this data should be used. With­out a cen­tral under­stand­ing of how to organ­ise the data or how to cat­e­gorise it, there is no gov­er­nance on how to best utilise it and no real cross-chan­nel mes­sag­ing. Each plat­form acti­vates audi­ences inde­pen­dent­ly, result­ing in a brand deliv­er­ing dif­fer­ent mes­sages that are rarely aligned.

In con­trast, brands with a sol­id grasp on their data and using the insights gained from it are bet­ter posi­tioned to pro­vide the kinds of per­son­alised expe­ri­ences cus­tomers are look­ing for. “A brand that under­stands its con­sumer data,” Solomons said, “can lever­age it to meet the needs of their con­sumers in new and inter­est­ing ways, deliv­er­ing bet­ter over­all expe­ri­ences that dri­ve results.”

The key, of course, is find­ing a way to cap­ture all of the data com­ing in and mak­ing sense of it in a way that dri­ves mar­ket­ing deci­sions. For many com­pa­nies, this will mean a new way of think­ing about how they do business.

Like many com­pa­nies, Adobe has been on its own trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney over the last six years. In fact, we shift­ed an entire dig­i­tal media busi­ness to the cloud, which meant scrap­ping our old approach of sell­ing boxed prod­ucts pri­mar­i­ly via chan­nel part­ners to sell­ing sub­scrip­tions pri­mar­i­ly through Adobe.com. In a short span of time, we went from hav­ing zero to mil­lions of paid sub­scribers to the Cre­ative Cloud. As a result of the new busi­ness mod­el, we now have a direct rela­tion­ship with the entire cus­tomer base. We opened up the Adobe fran­chise to a whole host of new audi­ences and gained access to prod­uct usage data unlike any­thing we had ever seen before.

To tru­ly become a data-dri­ven organ­i­sa­tion, we realised that we had to make some sig­nif­i­cant changes from the per­spec­tives of peo­ple, process, and tech­nol­o­gy. By evolv­ing in these areas, Adobe is help­ing mar­keters all over the world to iden­ti­fy and reach the right audi­ences and lever­age their data more effec­tive­ly with the objec­tive of deliv­er­ing the right mes­sage to the right per­son at the right time.

To learn more about how we’ve been util­is­ing data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing at Adobe, I invite you to sign up for my upcom­ing webi­nar on Data-Dri­ven Mar­ket­ing. I’ll be shar­ing more about Adobe’s jour­ney, the tools and strate­gies we’ve used, and how our data-dri­ven approach has rev­o­lu­tionised our paid media and email strate­gies. I hope you’ll walk away with some help­ful insights to strength­en your own data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing strategy.