Every organization knows the problem of a growing number of channels and data. To better serve today's discerning consumer, everything has to be cleverly tied together. So what's holding everyone back now? On the everyday challenges that stand in the way of data-driven marketing.
Targeted and relevant communication
According to Conway's Law, every department has its own system and communication structure. Especially in medium to enterprise companies, this results in fragmented data in all kinds of systems and departments. This happens not only in sales, purchasing, or customer service, but also in online marketing. Email statistics, visit and click behavior, lead generation and social media interaction are still separated into individuals and data silos at many companies. This results in limitations on marketing opportunities, such as retargeting to one stage in the customer journey, lookalikes based solely on ad data and an incomplete view of the consumer.In practice, this means many irrelevant communication messages that feel like "spam": persistent ads for products the customer has already bought, the wrong messages for the wrong target audience and a disjointed set of interactions. In short: the exact opposite of what every marketer wants: targeted, relevant, timely communication with target audiences across channels and touchpoints. The ability to meet today's customer demands is closely related to two factors: integration between communication channels and data availability from those channels. Together, these make up the data driven marketing maturity model.
Data-driven-marketing maturity model
These two factors result in four different situations that companies can find themselves in:
Single-channel marketing. Traditional marketing where the different communication channels are not integrated. Content is driven from different departments and tooling based on data silos.
Omnichannel marketing. Many companies that claim their marketing is omnichannel are in practice working with different departments that do not (yet) integrate their data properly. Although the different in- and outbound communication channels are integrated, they do not (yet) result in personalized marketing because only a small portion of the customer data is available in the 1-to-f1 communication.
Single-channel data-driven 1-to-1 marketing. Personalized 1-to-1 marketing using integrated relationship data. However, departments and tooling still work separately from each other. As a result, content is not integrated and aligned with the context of the communication channels.
Omnichannel data-driven 1-to-1 marketing. Personalized 1-to-1 marketing using integrated relationship data. Here, tooling allows a multidisciplinary team to drive in- and outbound communication channels and content in a contextualized and integrated way.