How Data will really drive Marketing in 2017

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2017 will probably be the year that data will become the core pillar around which most marketing functions will revolve. We've seen big data creep in to all aspects of business – from corporate strategy to marketing, from sales to attribution, and across both offline and online. This year, we are going to see the real use of data. And data made human. Data for us all.

More collaborative marketing using data

Data will drive more collaborative efforts in three ways: within marketing teams, with marketing teams and other departments in an organization, and in the special case – between two different brand marketing teams who somehow have to gain when they collaborate to access the target audience and the customer.

Decisions become transparent and far more realistic when they are informed by data. But data isn't enough in itself. Marketers must learn to efficiently convert data into insights and business information that is useful. This is what makes a company, and particularly, the marketing department agile. Free flow of data, sharing of insight derived from data, and cross pollination of data.

Increased use of data for decision making

Data is really going to be core for marketing decision making in 2017. This is inevitable and marketers need to understand and adapt to this trend. This is a reality. Data, and data analytics – meaning converting data into usable information is the best way to find the 'low-hanging fruit' which improves marketing performance. However, this data has to be useful and available (see next point). The insight that we get from data needs to be actionable and human – meaning both understandable and useful in a real world. Data can be overwhelming, because every channel, every touchpoint delivers certain data. But this needs to be interpreted and shared at a common, collaborative level.

DAAS and DoD

Data as a Service (DaaS) and Data on Demand. Businesses will no longer need to work through the 4Vs of Big Data (Volume, Variety, Velocity, Veracity) at huge costs of time and money. A new breed of data brokers will emerge to provide DaaS and let brands access Data when they need it, and simply have that analysed based on immediate need. We’ll see advancements to humanize big data, making it more qualitative and useful and add layers of empathy –projecting it in a more visualized, accessible way.

Data should deliver better attribution for marketing

Once data is humanized and made simple, marketers should be better able to understand how they use data to derive clearer attribution modelling across the channels they use. Attribution should not be driven by spends – but by results derived out of precise analytics.

The number of channels being used in modern marketing itself is a challenge.. Often customers will go through a dozen or more touchpoints before converting. Tracking a customer journey across those multiple channels is not easy at all.  Attributing value to each step is complicated without understandable and meaningful data. With so many new channels coming up every day, and with much of offline data being fairly 'dark' – the data-to-real-insight conversion will be key.

Hyper personalized marketing using data

Consumers are savvy. They just don't have the time and patience for marketing messages that aren't really of relevance to them. Data is going to help marketers in 2017 make messages and conversations that brands have with customers pin point personalized and accurate. Not only just the content and tone of the messages, data will obviously also help decide which channels to use to deliver those messages. Data architecture will need to be made robust in order to hyper-personalize marketing.

Data to make online marketing a lot more accountable. Really.

We've heard that online is accountable, digital is accountable. But how often do brand marketers ask their media agencies to deliver on that accountability? Or ask how creative agencies are performing based on how the actual brand creative delivers on desired action? Online marketing data in 2017 will drill down to details – not just superficial Click Through Rates and Open Rates. Issues such as click fraud, viewability, and view-through conversions will become frequent topics of conversations between agencies and data-driven marketing teams.

Overall, 2017 will really challenge both marketing teams as well as the business intelligence units that deliver data to make data more accessible, more understandable, and more useful. Data in a real world will be core. And we need to understand that as soon as possible.

That's something fundamental to marketing today. The value and usefulness of data. And that's the basics. That's Digital Marketing Strategies 101.

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