5 Steps to an Optimal Data Foundation for improved marketing, and better business decision making

When you speak with most CMOs they will will tell you about their data practices and strategies, and nearly all have the same goals:

• Use data to optimize processes and the customer experience.
• Use data, AI and automation to handle manual tasks so that the team may focus on the truly human and creative side of business.
• Deliver clarity across every team, division, tool and process to understand what really drives progress.
• Provide leadership with real-time visibility into spent budgets and outcomes generated by every dollar.

Data-Driven Strategies Propel Businesses Ahead

If your business has any of these data priorities in place, you’re lightyears ahead of most competition.

Everyone says that they are data-driven, but once you start digging deeper into their processes it typically reveals a haphazard approach to using data.

By most reports and estimates only 53% of marketing decisions are influenced by marketing analytics. CMOs have the data, enough data to measure every interaction and customer signal and yet, they’re not fully using it to drive important strategic decisions.

Often times data is merely used to validate the company direction while 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.

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 becomes all about price followed by 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.

Living With Data Silos

The proliferation of technology across all aspects of our business has both brought us closer together and further apart.

Historically, tech stacks were more all-encompassing., however, today there are software and point solutions for every need.

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 attribution.

Customer experiences become fragmented at a time when delivering a personal, relevant and seamless experience is expected by every customer.

A large percentage of marketers struggle with poor technology integrations and while 83% of executives acknowledge they have data silos and 97% believe those silos are negatively impacting business, not much is being done to correct the issue.

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.

Data or Information?

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. So many marketing dashboards and KPIs measure an outcome but tell you little about the factors that led to that outcome.

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. Data is easy to come by but 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.

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 and less clear insights.

Getting data right is hard and requires an investment in a particular set of skills and tools.

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.

5 steps to an optimized data foundation:

1. Update and integrate your tech stack to connect your data sources across platforms and processes. 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. Act on your data to trigger everything from marketing outreach to predictive churn models to AI intelligence.
2. Establish data governance. Take the time to set a solid data governance process to ensure accuracy, standardization, consistency and compliance across all teams.
3. 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.
4. Promote a culture of testing and experimentation. This will allow you to continuously gain more data about customers' preferences and motivations. Capture increasing amounts of first-party data to fuel better customer targeting and improve digital experiences.
5. 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. Get corporate support to experiment and learn along the way to your data-driven strategies.

If necessary, 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 for the Future of Your Business

Start with your data, look at your data, invest in your data and 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.