How is marketing data being used?

As the survey report eloquently puts it, ‘the pursuit of digital maturity is increasingly synonymous with the pursuit of data maturity.’

With businesses commonly combining online and offline data, and data increasingly the foundation of every marketing action, this statement can be broadened. Marketing maturity = data maturity.

This data maturity in turn defines how easily marketers can engender a one-to-one interaction with customers at scale.

This chart shows how marketer’s responded when asked what they do with their marketing data.

data maturity

The stand-out stats are that 39% of respondents either have an actionable SCV (20%) or are employing some form of predictive analytics to anticipate customer behaviour (19%).

Further down the maturity scale, it’s also encouraging to see 32% of respondents targeting lookalike audiences on third-party websites or applications.

This has been popularised by technology from Facebook (Lookalike Audiences functionality was expanded in 2014), Twitter and Google (Customer Match was launched in 2015).

Of course, DMPs and DSPs have allowed this tactic across paid media for some time now.

When it comes to attribution, 26% of respondents are going beyond ‘first touch’ or ‘last touch’ models.

Though this is a long way from a majority, it’s still a promising figure, given attribution technology’s seemingly perennial status as marketers’ bête noire.

Do organisations have a data strategy in place?

Though the data maturity of client-side respondents seems encouraging, the data strategy responses show organisations are still working hard to get their houses in order.

Fully 23% of respondents have no formal approach whatsoever (see Figure 4 below). 51% are working towards a strategy.

However, 18% admit to gaps in an otherwise solid data strategy. This means a combined 26% are bullish about data strategy. 

DATA STRATEGY

What else is in the report?

Data-driven marketing has enormous implications for structures, tools, processes and people within an organisation.

This Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing assays many aspects of this business transformation, surveying over 3,600 marketing, digital and ecommerce professionals, in November 2015.

Topics include return on data, a whole customer view, audience amplification, predictive analytics and outpacing the competition.