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The Gist
- Data-driven strategies. Embedding data in every strategic decision propels businesses ahead, optimizing processes and enhancing customer experiences.
- Data-driven leadership. Leadership must overcome data silos and fragmented tech, ensuring data-driven insights drive coherent customer experiences.
- Data-driven decision-making. Transform raw data into actionable information, guiding proactive, informed decisions that drive business forward.
Talking to CMOs about their data practices and data-driven strategies, I hear a similar wish list:
- Data embedded in every strategic decision.
- Data that optimizes every process, work product and customer experience.
- Teams replacing manual efforts using AI and automation, to focus on the truly human and creative side of business.
- Clarity across every team, division, tool and process to understand what really drives progress.
- Real-time visibility into spent budgets and outcomes generated by every dollar.
Does this sound like a data-driven CMO? Be honest, does this sound like your business or a pipe dream?
Data-Driven Strategies Propel Businesses Ahead
If your business has any of these data priorities in place, you’re lightyears ahead of most competition.
Like so many technology buzzwords, “data-driven” is the term du jour to describe every business, software, tactic and decision-maker.
Everyone’s data-driven, until you start asking questions and peeling the onion layers to reveal a haphazard approach to using data, at best.
The result? Only 53% of marketing decisions are influenced by marketing analytics. CMOs have the data — enormous amounts of data to measure every interaction and customer signal — yet, they’re not fully using it to inform important strategic decisions.
Even worse, 33% said decision-makers cherry-pick data to try to tell a story that aligns with their preconceived decision or opinion. They’re using data to validate the direction they want to go in, ignoring contrary signals.
Despite being data-driven on the surface, most companies face significant challenges when it comes to truly unlocking the full potential of data-drive strategies.
That’s a huge shame ― in today’s digital age, data is a new currency. It’s arguably a business’s most important and unique asset.
As global competition impacts product novelty and commoditizes more services every day, businesses differentiate themselves by delivering more value and deepening customer loyalty — otherwise, it’s all about price and a race to the bottom.
Data can tell you how to deliver greater efficiency for teams, value to customers and deepen loyalty along the way.
Let’s look at three key areas “data-driven” executives go wrong and fail to unlock their data’s full potential.
Related Article: Finally, a Data Book for CMOs Detailing Data Monetization Strategies
Living With Data Silos
The proliferation of technology across all aspects of our business has both brought us closer together (hey there, Slack, Zoom, + TikTok) and further apart.
Historically, our tech stacks were more all-encompassing. Today, there are software and solutions for every need — just plug it in to fill that hole and float on your merry way.
This fragmentation wreaks havoc on accessing, standardizing, analyzing and using data-driven strategies effectively. It leads to duplicated efforts, inconsistencies and errors. It torpedoes the effective use of automation, personalization and full-funnel attribution.
In turn, our customer experiences become fragmented at a time when delivering a personal, relevant and seamless experience is expected by every customer.
If you’re feeling this pain, you are in good company. Emarsys found that:
- 35% of surveyed marketers struggle with poor technology integrations.
- 27% blame personalization challenges on an inability to act on existing customer data.
- 83% of executives acknowledge they have data silos.
- 97% believe those silos are negatively impacting business.
As the survey proves, siloed data causes pain and inefficiency for both the internal teams responsible for delivering valuable customer experiences and executives responsible for proactive decision-making and the overall health of the company.
Related Article: Challenges or Opportunities? Maximizing Customer Data to Thrive in 2023
Prioritizing Data When You Really Need Information
This is one of my professional pet peeves. Today’s organizations have endless amounts of data and are too fast and too willing to accept data at the expense of information.
Data is raw, unprocessed facts and figures. It’s unorganized and has no inherent meaning on its own. Think about so many marketing KPIs — they measure an outcome but tell you nothing helpful about the factors that led to that outcome.
Without intervention, data offers no context and is a poor and misleading tool for understanding past performance and driving decision-making.
Information, on the other hand, is data that has been processed and organized into a meaningful context. It’s purposeful and comes from contextual analysis. It’s not just a “what” outcome, but considers the “why,” which is necessary for us to make proactive decisions and forecasts.
Lazy execs use data — particularly positive data points that support their preconceived assumptions. Data is easy to come by ― information requires some grunt work.
To gain full value from your data, it must be organized, contextualized, analyzed and turned into valuable information to support decisions and drive your business forward.
Related Article: Making Sense of Dark Data With AI: Hidden Treasures for Marketers
Lack of In-House Skills + Data Foundation
If it was easy to set up, manage and maximize data across increasingly complex business landscapes, we wouldn’t have more data than ever before — and less clear insights.
I’ll be real — getting data right is hard and requires an investment in a particular set of skills and tools.
Competition to hire that skillset is high — four in five employers globally report difficulty finding the skilled talent they need in 2023, and IT and data lands in first place as the most in-demand technical skills.
Luckily, you have many options. You can:
- Hire in-house talent and invest in a robust data architecture.
- Work with a partner to set up your data infrastructure for your team to maintain.
- Work with a partner to both set up your data infrastructure and manage data integrations, data health, executing reporting, visualizations and more.
- Train your teams in data literacy (I recommend you do this anyway, regardless of the hiring choices you make).
Hiring the right people with the right skillset solves one challenge, but you must empower those team members with a secure and scalable data practice to connect, cleanse, standardize, normalize, automate, visualize and act on your data.
Build the right data foundation:
- Replace legacy systems with modern, integrated technology to connect your data sources across platforms and processes for a single, unified view. Take advantage of cloud solutions for robust security and flexibility, without legacy tool siloes. A customer data platform is one example of a scalable and flexible data infrastructure that allows for efficient capture, storage, automation and analysis of data from multiple sources. Even better? You can act on your data to trigger everything from marketing outreach to predictive churn models to AI intelligence.
- Establish data governance. Take the time to set a solid data governance process to ensure accuracy, standardization, consistency and compliance across all teams.
- Secure data privacy to protect your customers and overall business. Set clear data processes, build secure systems, restrict access to need-to-know team members, and always comply with data privacy regulations (such as GDPR and CCPA) to protect customer data privacy.
- Double down on customer loyalty. Focus on customer loyalty to capture increasing amounts of first-party data to fuel better customer targeting and improve digital experiences.
- Promote a culture of testing and experimentation. This will allow you to continuously gain more data about customers’ preferences and motivations.
- Get help when you need it. These skill sets are hard to come by and if your data infrastructure and supporting technology is put together ineffectively, you’re wasting time, budget and opportunity on unreliable or unactionable data insights.
Overcome data challenges by investing in the right infrastructure, modernizing systems, setting data governance processes, focusing on security measures, and empowering your teams with data literacy training and the corporate blessing to test-and-learn along the way to your data-driven strategies.
You don’t need to go at it alone. Find the right partners to supplement your team’s data analytics skills and help you integrate and set up a solid and secure data infrastructure.
Get Data Right to Future-Proof Your Business
Want to understand your customers better? Start with your data.
Want to know what’s working and why? Look at your data.
Want to set three, five, and 10-year goals for your business? Invest in your data.
Want to empower your teams with confidence to make better, more proactive decisions? Get your data foundation right.
Data-driven strategies start and end with reliable and actionable data — and the tools, processes and teams to turn that data into information.
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