How to turn marketing into a data-driven science
The initial panic over social media has passed. Content has become the new creative.
Now marketing teams are looking for the best structure to function in this established digital, social world where data demands new skills, new ways of working, new leadership styles.
By reshaping the team around digital and data, using data analysis to demonstrate the impact from marketing, marketers gain the insight and credibility to demonstrate the power of customer-centricity throughout the business.
Gareth Case, currently marketing director at CSC and who in a previous role reshaped the marketing team at Xchanging, believes it’s no longer possible to function in today’s fragmented marketing environment without highly specialised skills. Case believes that generalists need to be replaced with specialists. (More from him later.)
The trick is to avoid these ’specialist’ sub-teams falling into fractured silos.
By aligning customer data and functional objectives, marketing naturally focuses the business on the customer — helping the business deliver the right content, at the right time, to drive better performance. This doesn't just apply to lead capture, but also to the delivery of promises to the customer.
Further highlighting the opportunity for marketing to drive business growth is a report by cmo.com, noting that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies that are not focused on the customer.
By embedding customer metrics across the business, the culture unconsciously ‘bends’ around the customer. Customer and organisation engage authentically and honestly, and the business listens at least as much as it broadcasts.
Pyramids of generalists, increasing budget and authority as they move up the pile, have disappeared.
Marketing teams now resemble flat groups of cells, each cell with different specialisms, each cell feeding on customer data.
These flatter teams perform to their best when mutually co-dependent, sharing data to optimise performance across the team.
For instance, the 2015 Content Marketing Institute report asked how often teams met to discuss progress with content marketing programmes. The teams that meet most frequently (daily) are also the teams that place most value on the meetings and rate more effective in delivering against objectives.
Another interesting model clusters multi-function teams around brands, including customer management and IT disciplines that traditionally are not classed as ‘marketing’.
The point is, throughout marketing, fluid ways of working and influential styles of leadership have emerged, giving marketing the influence to drive change across the business.
Altimeter recently reported that 67% of marketers named measurement as the top area in which they needed to invest this year.
Traditional measures of reach and frequency can’t describe how people engage across channels.
And vanity social metrics (likes, views) are difficult to attribute ROI to.
And while the absolute quantity of new digital data can seem overwhelming, it’s creating opportunity. No one in the business is better suited than marketing to give business meaning to this customer data, linking metrics to behaviour and results.
Once marketing demonstrates data-driven success in its own function, a data driven conversation opens up across the business.
