At a recent London event held by TagMan, it became apparent that the term big data has become a bit of a non-term since on a daily basis, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Isn’t it all therefore, big data?
With this sea of information around us, how is the marketer’s relationship with data evolving and how can we manage this mass of inter-related knowledge effectively, so that we harness its power for driving efficiencies and creating good business practices?
Ease of data consolidation gives power throughout organisations
The ability to consolidate and manage customer data in a clear and user-friendly format will give not only the marketing department, but business professionals from the top down the power to work data to their advantage.
Data handling is now moving out of the realm of the IT department and is becoming an organisation-wide recognised advantage for success.
Companies who deal in the consolidation and organisation of data have recognised that there is a business need to create systems which are understandable not just by the IT department, but by executives wishing to draw conclusions from their customer data and assess the impact on revenue.
A marketing department that is empowered to gain insights from their customer data without the reliance on their IT teams will prove far more effective in convincing budget holders to increase investment in channels that are driving sales.
If a marketer recognises that many more sales can be attributed to display advertising, for example, this is an invaluable piece of information which is also tangible, meaning the marketer can act upon this outcome by changing their ad spend patterns to reward the most successful channels.
TagMan client, and panellist at our TagMeet event, Vodafone’s marketing manager Gareth Davies reinforced this point and was emphatic about the necessity to attribute a value to each channel in the conversion path: "we’ve established a value-based structure for our online advertising and are able to evaluate the areas which work best. Display advertising came top on our list and we re-adjusted our budget accordingly."
A Forrester report on the total economic impact of the TagMan tag management solution found that within a major international airline, usingTagMan resulted in savings within both the ecommerce and IT sectors of businesses, benefiting the organisation as a whole. Forrester reported that 120 man hours were saved per month, equalling $65,770 US per year purely in development cost savings.
Agencies and manpower needed more now than ever before
At TagMeet, there was much debate around the relevance of advertising agencies and perhaps how agencies shouldn’t be data-handling now that this can be done in an automated fashion.
However data crunching has only ever been one string to an agency’s bow. If a data management system can intelligently deliver up some data that is easy to understand and manipulate, this frees up a swathe of the agency’s time for creative thinking.
Using pre-analysed data to come up with some seriously powerful campaign planning for generating a sales boost for a client can take agency and in-house marketing activity up a notch.
By being clever in their approach to data management and by partnering with the right technology providers, agencies can become even more indispensable to a client’s revenue generation.
Universal users demand universal interfaces
The way data is presented can have a big impact on the insights a person is able to glean from the data. Encouraging wider marketing accountability across a business requires a system that is universally user friendly.
You need a portal where anyone can view and understand the entire marketing mix at a glance, understand how various elements interact together as well as having the ability to change and update campaigns and download reports for presenting to colleagues and superiors.
Being able to action decisions based on easy-to-understand data makes the business of data management incredibly easy for many people throughout the organisation. At TagMan we recently updated our own user interface to focus far more on data visualisation which has proved a success.
The rise in data complexity is only going to increase but the opportunities are there for businesses to really get to grips with harnessing their customer data for greater marketing efficiency.
Having the right technology to aggregate and help drive insights from data and encouraging a wider sphere of stakeholders within the business to take ownership of data marketing will give savvy marketers an edge over their competition.