What does it mean to be a data-driven marketing success in 2015?

Ian Michiels writes for mycustomer.com:

Micro segmentation over 1:1 personalisation

Even when data is readily available to inform highly targeted engagement, someone actually has to produce the creative and copy to trigger the engagement.

I was on a panel at an Adobe event late last year when the topic of 1-to-1 marketing came up.  I have always been a huge advocate of trying to get as close as you can to 1-to-1 marketing, but that comes with a caveat.  The cost to get to the elusive everyone is individualized is massive.  When I say as close as you can, what I mean is start from the top of your customer list (not by alphabetical order, but by some worth and frequency or potential worth metric) and work as far down that list as you can to create 1-to-1 marketing for your best customers.  The other customers you want to have as many segments as makes sense, but always allow the data to drive those segmentation decisions,  

Automating up-sell and cross-sell campaigns

Marketing is the only function in the business that actively communicates across the entire spectrum of the customer lifecycle, from the inquiry to a loyal customer. That raises two very interesting questions that data-driven marketing has answers for:

• Should marketing own the customer lifecycle?

• How should marketing allocate time, budget, and effort across the customer lifecycle?

As I commented on recently in my article Retention is King, retention's the first place I start when implementing a marketing automation program.  The customer lifecycle should be owned by marketing.  Marketing has all the tools to automate the communications in the relationship and target based on behavioral and demographic data.  When it comes to the question of time allocation, make sure the retention programs are dialed in.  They will never be finished and you will always be tweaking, but then you can move on to acquisition and reactivation.  It is much easier to cross-sell or up-sell a loyal customer than it is to acquire a new one.

A/B testing on landing pages and email campaigns

According to the 2014 Gleanster Marketing Resource Management report, only 60% of small and mid-size firms conduct A/B tests on email, landing pages, and website properties. It’s actually shocking to learn how much you really don’t know about your customers when you run A/B tests on creative and copy.

In sales they say "ABC", Always Be Closing.  In marketing automation and data driven businesses we should say "ABT", Always Be Testing.  The caveat to this saying is there needs to be an understanding of a baseline first.  So if you are implementing a new program, let it run for a bit (unless it is a total disaster), use analytics to look for opportunities and test those opportunities.  Don't just test for the sake of testing, always let the data drive the opportunities and then test the hypothesis.

Machine learning is your best friend

One consistent theme that keeps coming up in our advisory sessions is that marketers want help in data analysis. Thanks to advances in computing power, data analysis that previously took days can now be done in seconds and often in the cloud. Machine learning applies rules to data sets and looks for correlations between data. Does this do the job of a marketer? Heck no! What machine learning does for marketing is help isolate trends that should be investigated further. Marketers still need the context about customers and products to translate those correlations in the data into action.

As I said just above, let the data drive your testing.  Machine learning and data mining techniques can uncover insights within your data that the human eye could never perceive just by looking.  Many marketers want a predictive modeling tool to spit out an answer as to what they should do and just go do it.  If that were the case, why do we need the marketer?  It is important to make sure to understand what the outputs of these tools provide and test their findings.  Without the business acumen, the output could be very flawed.  Don't jump to a conclusion, use the insight to form hypothesis about your customers and test away.  Remember as I wrote before, Data + Insight = Action.

'70 Percent of CRM Installs Fail' and Other Crappy Stats You Should Ignore

The big stat that I think is very interesting is the total amount of organizations that have marketing technology installed.  Such a low number.

by looking at data from 3 million businesses in our Fall 2014 report, that the truth — a statistically significant number across all sizes of business, and 151 industries — is much harsher. Marketing technology (as a whole) only has 4.1% penetration, let alone marketing automation.

The Slow Decline of Companies

In Seth Godin's latest blog he mentions how company's almost always melt, they rarely explode. It is almost always the short-term thinking of today that causes the crisis of tomorrow. 

Rarely in the moment, when business is down and your customers are no longer engaged can a corporation look back and find the reason. That's because it's multiple little reasons that were made in years past for short-term gains that lost the customers trust. 

Trust in a personal relationship is hard to regain, but trust in a consumer to business relationship is almost impossible to regain. 

How to Find, Assess, and Hire the Modern Marketer

Who is the modern marketer?

Regardless of the role in marketing, the expectations related to data and analytics need to be consistent. While there will always be more advanced analytical and technical positions, there is a new baseline for all marketers. The skill set includes a knowledge of data management principles and analytical strategies, and an understanding of the role of data quality, the importance of data governance, and the value of data in marketing disciplines. Today’s marketer needs to go well beyond reporting and metrics, and be more proficient in a full range of analytics, which may include optimization, text, sentiment, scoring, modeling, visualization, forecasting, and attribution.

Marketers need to have experience with the technology, tools, and design approaches that leverage data and analytics. Campaign design, multi-channel integration, content performance, personalization, and digital marketing can all be driven by fact-based decision-making, ideally with direct accountability to results and the ability to very quickly react and adjust to the demands of the customer and the market. The marketers I am referring to have a distinct blend of creativity and reasoning talents; they are inquisitive, inventive, and enthused by a culture that is advanced and agile.

Great article that really describes what marketers are becoming.  I believe this change in what a marketer is has been happening for quite a few years now.  A a marketer It is so important to understand the tools, data and how to analyze the data.  

Digital Marketing - The Benefits of Always-On versus Campaign

Within the digital space, campaign based marketing acts like the traditional “push” model. The goal is to communicate a key marketing message to as many people as possible in hopes that they will learn a specific message and/or perform a certain action. They are in the market until the objective is complete, then they go silent again. The always-on models acts like the “pull” model, focusing on finding the specific people who want to know more about what you offer and will thus participate with us in some way. The always-on model runs indefinitely, it is just optimized over time.

Hmmm.  Articles like this make me wonder what the future of marketing looks like.  So many so-called experts talk in circles and and paint a picture of this perfect world.  What David Alexander is describing is something that costs a fortune and takes many years to build.   

Eventually we may find all of this "free" and "cheap" marketing is so much more expensive than the traditional campaign based marketing we are all trying to get rid of. 

How A ZIP Code Can Tell A Marketer Exactly Who You Are

Yep. 

Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and IT

...IT organization has been transitioning from the traditional development approach of (1) define functional requirements, then (2) design, then (3) build (the "waterfall" approach) to making quick, small changes to systems ("Agile Scrum").

The waterfall approach kills companies that are not in the software business.  Since internal products are not sold, nor measured by sales, its easier for IT departments to hide behind process.  Process and requirements kill companies.  Companies in this current age need to be faster to market.  

Agile and Scrum have allowed ING to respond quickly to signals from customers. But moving to continuous delivery is a struggle. Some business people who are used to the traditional waterfall method can fall into an unfortunate cycle: taking months to develop requirements, then waiting for IT to respond, then telling IT that's not what they wanted. Now instead at ING they say, "Here's your team. You need to be in every daily or weekly Scrum cycle or sprint to decide if the work is meeting your needs." It demands more time from the business people, but they are engaged and own it.

The Agile method is so much more effective to engage the business.  The business moves at the speed of sound compared to IT and if the IT department gets buried into process, the business loses faith in IT and finds another way.  This doesn't make sense for the business, but it happens to get things done. 

While Scrum has been employed primarily in software development, ING shows that it has broader management applications. They have used Agile Scrum as a key tool for collaboration across functions in processes such as developing new products and in marketing campaigns. And the frequent (daily or weekly) meetings accelerate decision-making.

This is very interesting and I have never thought about all decision making changing to an Agile Scrum.  In my business, I deploy an "unofficial" Agile Scrum, just have never thought about it from that point of view.  I believe it works so much better, to be engaged daily in your business and with your team.