Marketing Recovery Series: Is your data ready for action?

We’ve all collected stories that illustrate what this pandemic has meant to us, our friends, families, colleagues, customers. Challenges overcome, sacrifices made. We’ve also kept a close eye on the data, both globally and locally – witnessing its value and shortcomings. What’s clear is that data has taken centre stage, with health organizations and governments around the world tracking, recording and acting on the numbers to mitigate the size and spread of the pandemic.

Data has given us real-time information and traceability. Travel and other indicators, like hospital parking lot congestion and waste water samples, are being used to inform a true picture of spread and infection rates. Taiwan’s big-data approach set the bar for data integration in action, while we’ve seen an astonishing lack of meaningful data in other countries despite no shortage of information or technology.

In recovery, data (and humanizing it) must continue its leading role. The winners will be organizations who understand and respond to changing market dynamics as well as consumer circumstances, and prioritize clean, integrated and meaningful data sets.

Prioritize actionable data

We must respond to, rather than react to, market changes. Actionable data leads to competitive advantage when it serves both business and customers. Prioritizing structured, customer-centric data management will ensure useful data is collected and used respectfully.

Transform actionable data into marketing success

Data is abundant, relevance is scarce and trust in brands is low. Without actionable insights, data money is wasted. We need to ask the right questions to transform data investments into commercial successes.

Create a customer-centric data strategy

Think about how your customers experience your data decisions. Consider small-data projects, which are relatively easy to deploy and can quickly improve marketing effectiveness. To get small data working for you, create a customer-centric strategy that clearly outlines what data, and why. Source stable third-party data that can close gaps in current needs. Work from clean, well-structured, integrated data sets. Use it to connect media for a more impactful customer journey.

 Learn from data-driven marketing campaigns

We love these data-driven brands who are using actionable insights to connect effectively:

• Netflix could have been tempted by subscriber counts. Instead it’s prioritizing data etiquette by cleaning up unused accounts and asking if people want to cancel to save money.
• SickKids Foundation took back the fight with a sophisticated, data-enabled approach to cross-channel integration that included real-time relevance, true connection and astonishing results.
• Aiming to attract new users and increase conversion, Wayfair used qualified data sets to find the best channel mix.

Get your brand into the right hands with data-driven direct mail

Like digital channels, direct mail is data-driven. The big difference? Data targeting with direct mail literally puts your brand in customer hands. Geolocation data connects direct mail to out-of-home and digital media, responding to digital interaction when connected to owned channels and used for retargeting. The six alphanumeric characters of a postal code don’t just tell us where people live. The data behind the code says a lot about who they are and how they live.

Enhance omni-channel targeting with postal code data

Like other media, you can use postal code data to understand audience coverage and composition, enhance reach and meet targeting goals. Combined with first-party data (customer service, store, email, social media and website) postal code data can improve omni-channel targeting. Thanks to programmatic technology, brands can now turn digital traffic into addressable households. With increased tracking capabilities through address matching, it’s a faster way to close the marketing-sales-retention loop.

Read more from our Marketing Recovery Series here.