The future of marketing for large entreprises
Marketing has always been agile. And all the more so, in the digital world of today. But large enterprises want audit-friendly processes, budget controls, compliances, transparency & ROI from their Marketing team.
How can they manage the apparent conflict?
The sole objective of marketing is to ensure that investments in marketing activities generate adequate returns by way of exposure & leads which ultimately lead to sales. It is the responsibility of sales to ‘convert’ the leads into hard sales. To merge responsibilities, many Chief Marketing Officers have taken on the mantle of Chief Business Officer, with the combined responsibility. At the same time, large enterprises want their marketing teams to embrace process automation with real time budget control & audit compliance.
Hence, marketing must have workflow automation which provides the required controls while promoting agility.
The Case for Unified Marketing Processes
Today’s marketing processes are based on a mix of email, attachments, local software and finance software. The workflow, decisions & approvals are largely executed via email, with the liberal use of spreadsheets & other attachments. After the campaign is completed, very often the executed campaign data is fed into a finance software as P.O. This is followed by the vendor invoices for settlement. This popular method invariably results in a lot of questions from the finance team as they are not privy to the actual process.
This is the problem with traditional marketing. With today’s digital marketing, (especially programmatic) visibility is limited to the few who are directly involved in the campaign. Planning, execution & settlement is a seamless process, driven sometimes by the same team.
So it becomes all the more important for the enterprise to have a view based on the merged real time online data with the offline data.
Marketing Data
The traditional problem of marketing is the lack of real time hard data to measure ROIs. Digital has covered that adequately with platforms like Google & Facebook exposing campaign performance data in real time.
But consumer decisions are based on a mix of online & offline influences. And this means that marketing investments & performance data from online & offline must be seen together at some point. This can be achieved in a systematic way if we can bring analytics inside a unified marketing process.
Imagine an elastic system which can hold unlimited amounts of data. The Marketing Data Lake is such a repository which can expand on demand, adding storage efficiently.
Vast amounts of digital marketing data are available in near real time for every digital campaign. This data needs to be analyzed for new follow-up campaigns to be created & launched on a personal level for each consumer. But, a Marketing Data Lake must include data that covers the entire spectrum of marketing activities & investments – offline & online. And ideally extend to sales, competition, market research & more.
Data Lake
A marketing data lake fulfills the need for a central repository for all your data pertaining to marketing activities, marketing investments & the results. Updated in as near real time as possible.
Large enterprises must create their own marketing data lake to ensure that the marketing becomes data driven. To complete the picture, it must add sales & data, promotional offers, pricing changes, competition data, etc.
Marketing Data Lake will immediately double the visibility of marketing data to the C Suite with quick-reporting dashboards which present the true picture of marketing investments & activities.
The huge, updated data set should increase the frequency of analytics exercises. The regularly updated data set will make it feasible for testing & building analytics algorithms to increase efficiency & set directions for marketing. Having the past data is essential for building analytics models & algorithms.
The Marketing Data Lake should be linked to an analytics platform which can host multiple existing & in-the-pipeline models which feeds in on the massive past & present data.
Customer Data Platform
As things evolve, the Marketing Data Lake will receive more & more data on digital customer behavior, which must be ‘stitched’ with the offline marketing data (already available in the lake.) This will ensure a three sixty degree view of the customer, optimal targeting with minimum duplication in target audiences. This may balance the high dependency on Google & Facebook/Meta and even slow down their increasing rates. And also address the increasing concerns of consumer data privacy, by replacing the ‘cookie’ regime with first-party data.
A Marketing Data Lake which is future ready behaves as a Customer Data Platform, based mainly on first-party data.
Digital Transformation
The digital transformation of marketing departments for large enterprises involves 3 steps:
- Unified marketing processes across the enterprise.
- Marketing Data Lake to get the big picture constantly.
- Customer Data Platform to be future ready with online/offline data.
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About the author:
Biswajit Das, Founder, BrandIntelle Services