Many of today’s marketers belong to organisations that are going through a digital transformation. It’s a sign of the times as more and more companies are realising that most of their customers are online and the best way to reach them is through digital channels.
Today’s customers are almost always connected through multiple digital devices, and their expectations of the kinds of experiences they’re looking for have never been higher. A large part of digital transformation is getting to a place where customers are provided a relevant and personalised experience, the kind that drives the customer journey toward point of purchase and inspires brand loyalty. These kinds of experiences don’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re the result of multiple channels of data taken together to develop a 360-degree view of the customers a company is trying to reach.
Although most companies realise the crucial impact of data on their ability to create personalised customer experiences, Seth Solomons, CEO of advertising agency Wunderman, said in a recent interview with CMO.com, “We see a lot of clients struggling to get their arms around and understand their data. They want to make sense of it all, but many times they don’t have the skills inside their organisation. It is very difficult to translate their data into insights that inspire the ideas that drive their consumers to action.”
Magnitude of data usually isn’t a problem for many organisations. The data is there, but it’s often spread out and resides in many different silos. Consequently, each channel will collect its own data and have its own ideas for how this data should be used. Without a central understanding of how to organise the data or how to categorise it, there is no governance on how to best utilise it and no real cross-channel messaging. Each platform activates audiences independently, resulting in a brand delivering different messages that are rarely aligned.
In contrast, brands with a solid grasp on their data and using the insights gained from it are better positioned to provide the kinds of personalised experiences customers are looking for. “A brand that understands its consumer data,” Solomons said, “can leverage it to meet the needs of their consumers in new and interesting ways, delivering better overall experiences that drive results.”
The key, of course, is finding a way to capture all of the data coming in and making sense of it in a way that drives marketing decisions. For many companies, this will mean a new way of thinking about how they do business.
Like many companies, Adobe has been on its own transformation journey over the last six years. In fact, we shifted an entire digital media business to the cloud, which meant scrapping our old approach of selling boxed products primarily via channel partners to selling subscriptions primarily through Adobe.com. In a short span of time, we went from having zero to millions of paid subscribers to the Creative Cloud. As a result of the new business model, we now have a direct relationship with the entire customer base. We opened up the Adobe franchise to a whole host of new audiences and gained access to product usage data unlike anything we had ever seen before.
To truly become a data-driven organisation, we realised that we had to make some significant changes from the perspectives of people, process, and technology. By evolving in these areas, Adobe is helping marketers all over the world to identify and reach the right audiences and leverage their data more effectively with the objective of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
To learn more about how we’ve been utilising data-driven marketing at Adobe, I invite you to sign up for my upcoming webinar on Data-Driven Marketing. I’ll be sharing more about Adobe’s journey, the tools and strategies we’ve used, and how our data-driven approach has revolutionised our paid media and email strategies. I hope you’ll walk away with some helpful insights to strengthen your own data-driven marketing strategy.
The post The Challenge of Data-Driven Marketing appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog.