The number of customer digital touchpoints continues to increase unabated. And that means our marketing efforts are more measurable than ever and marketers are expected to be able to connect the dots between marketing campaigns and business results.
Furthermore, we're working in an environment in which marketers are expected to do more with the resources we have: Fully 67% of marketers surveyed for the Content Marketing Institute & MarketingProfs annual content marketing report (2021) agreed that their content team had been asked in the previous year to do more with the same resources.
In such an environment, it should be a no-brainer to use data to find efficiencies and eliminate wasted efforts.
And yet, when I work with marketers and business leaders across organizations large and small, I often find that the marketing metrics that are reported out are about reach or general engagement—not about customer insights or customer lifetime value.
However, what will drive business forward is our ability to learn about our customers, deliver more relevant messages to them, and improve their relationship with the brand through insights.
How Marketers Are Using Data
If you're feeling discouraged because your organization still faces significant limitations in data use, don't fret. You're not alone.
To better understand what organizations are facing and doing with regard to data-driven personalization, I and my team at Convince & Convert and our friends at social media and online community agency ICUC surveyed 319 marketers in B2B and B2C industries in August 2023.
Our study found the following:
- About a quarter of marketers say their companies are very mature or somewhat mature in relation to using data to drive personaliza¬tion; and 22.6% say they're moderately mature, 18.5% say slightly mature, and 9.1% say not at all mature.
- Only 25.2% of marketers strongly agree with the statement "My company is able to effectively analyze our owned customer data to gener¬ate valuable customer insights for marketing." Another 39.3% somewhat agree, and the rest either disagree or "neither disagree or agree," demonstrating that there are a lot of brands that need to improve to stay competitive.
- More than half of marketers say they are not collecting enough data or they are collecting only a moderate amount of data.
- It's no surprise that the most common types of data collected are customer relationship data (66.9%) and demographic data (65.0%)—but it is surprising that those numbers are so low, considering how basic they are. That incongruity could come down to marketers' lack of access to how their organizations collect data.
- It's also unsurprising that websites, landing pages, and email are the most common channels where brands collect data. But fewer than 50% of those surveyed say their companies collect data via customer/service support or paid channels. Those channels cost money to run; they should be integral parts of the data-collection ecosys¬tem so that companies can collect insights to improve efficiency and customer experience.
The survey showed that although data is part of the way organizations are running their marketing programs, there's a great deal of room to grow. And most marketers say they both need more data and have the opportunity to improve how data is used within their organizations.
Why Personalization Matters
Our opportunity is to use data to better understand our customers so that we can make better business decisions and provide more relevance to customers. How we demonstrate that relevance is through content and messages that speak to the specific needs, motivations, and attitudes of our customers.
I spoke to Chris Lu, co-founder of Copy.ai—an AI-driven copywriting plat¬form designed to help businesses scale their work—about how he sees the usage of data in marketing in the coming years. "Data is important to help you target and personalize. We believe marketing will become even more relevant and more personalized in the future. Ultimately, a business solves a problem, marketing shares the solution to the world. Marketing will be able to make sure the solution is most relevant to every potential buyer," Lu told me.
The potential is there. And now, because more affordable and accessible technology is available, more brands than ever before can benefit from the power of personalization.
Most marketers understand the potential. In fact, our research found that an overwhelming majority of marketers (80%) agree that data-driven personalization is very or extremely important for improving customer experiences. Furthermore, nearly 85% agree that data-driven personalization would provide a competitive advantage to their companies.
Marketers understand that personalization fulfills the needs of their audiences in many ways, while also providing benefits to their brands. In the survey, we asked what the top three benefits are that marketers asso¬ciate with data-driven personalization; respondents most often cited improved customer experience (49%), deeper customer insights (38%), and competitive advantage (34%).
The challenge marketers face isn't just about building the strategy to achieve an integrated approach to using data and personalization in their marketing; it's also about...
- Getting organizational and executive buy-in
- Nurturing a culture that cultivates strategic data use
- Hiring for people who can execute on the vision
- Implementing the approach with the right tools
- Having a seat at the table to actively play a role in how data is collected, analyzed, and used
My book, Data-Driven Personalization, which this article is excerpted from, helps you tackle those challenges, also exploring and addressing each of the benefits:
- Improved customer experience. Tailoring your customer touchpoints to the unique needs and specific motivations or attitudes of the customer makes it easier for them to learn/shop/engage with your brand and more relevant to their lives. (See Chapter 9 for more on customer experience.)
- Deeper customer insights. Understanding you customers (especially specific segments like best customers or most loyal customers) allows you to uncover the opportunities to get more out of your relationships with them and improve your customer lifetime value (CLV). (See Chapters 11, 12, and 19.)
- Competitive advantage. As technology continues to increase the expecta¬tions around personalization, knowing more about your customers and delivering better content, messages, and products to them will allow your brand to gain a competitive advantage and become the go-to choice for your customers. (Chapter 5 explores how to set the strategic foundation, but we'll look at this throughout the book.)
- Improved customer retention. Customers want to engage with brands that provide them with what they're looking for. The more your brand provides that highly relevant experience, the more they will stay with your brand. (Parts Three, Four, and Five go into this in-depth.)
- Higher conversion rates. Offers, messages, and resources that speak to the specific needs of your customers improves conversion rates. (We also touch upon this topic in Parts Three, Four, and Five.)
- Enhanced relevance. The more you know about your customers, the better your content marketing and merchandising can address the specific needs of your audience. This goes hand-in-hand with improving the customer experience and increasing engagement. (Parts Two and Three lay out the tools to increase relevance.)
- Cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Understanding your custom¬ers' past behaviors allows you to identify more pointed opportunities to cross-sell or upsell relevant, related products or services. (Chapter 19 discusses this topic.)
- Improved marketing performance or efficiency. Focusing on customers that are more likely to convert within each channel, specific to their needs and/or behaviors, allows your marketing teams to publish fewer market¬ing messages while improving performance. The goal is to do more with the same resources by focusing on the places and the messages that are most likely to resonate. (Parts Five and Six examine these opportunities.)
- Improved marketing return on investment. More strategically deployed marketing tactics that result in stronger performance should both increase return on investment (ROI). (Parts Five and Six also consider this theme.)
- Increased customer engagement. As customers find more of what they're looking for at the right times, customer engagement should improve in your most effective channels, providing your team feedback on the places to focus resources and energy. (We'll touch upon this idea throughout the book, but particularly in Part Two.)
Note: This edited extract is from Data-Driven Personalization by Zontee Hou ©2024. It is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd. Using code MarketingProfs20 will get you 20% off the purchase price of the book from the publisher's site; and if your address is in the US or UK, you'll also receive free shipping.
More Resources on Customer Data and Personalization
Hard Truths About B2B Personalization, Its Effectiveness, and Its Future
The Customer Data Conundrum: How CX Leaders Can Optimize Both Privacy and Personalization
Personalization: The Secret Weapon B2B Companies Are Not Using
Three Tests That Can Save Your Marketing Personalization Strategy
