• by Laura Desmond , October 18, 2018

Data is the practical manifestation of how marketers understand people, then activate that understanding in the marketplace. Putting the consumer at the center of all we do is a timeless refrain in marketing circles.

Over the last several years, the notion of people-based, consumer-first marketing has gained more momentum as a powerful way to engage with consumers across platforms, channels, mediums and devices.

In order to deliver personalized brand experiences that transcend both offline and online environments, marketers must leverage data to understand their consumers.  With data serving as the main proxy for consumers, why is it often dis-integrated from major marketing decisions?

In today’s disruptive marketing environment, data is the engine for growth and it must be at the center of a company’s strategy in order to deliver results.

These results can deliver transformative benefits, not the least of which includes increased revenue and profits and improved customer satisfaction and retention. That’s because data and analytics serve as a corporate compass, even outside of the marketing function – improving service-level performance; optimizing the supply chain and focusing product development on products with the greater upside.

Companies can't put the consumer at the center if data is siloed off somewhere else in the organization. Marketers must be able to leverage it to create marketing communications that get acted upon.

As further validation, a recent NewVantage Partners survey indicated that among top executives at Fortune 1000 companies, a near majority (48.4%) reported their firms are achieving measurable results from big data investments.

Interested in emulating proven data strategies of Fortune 1000 companies? Here are three ways businesses can use data to drive business growth:

• First-Party Data, plus…Brands cannot deliver on growth objectives using first-party data alone. Instead, they must effectively integrate a diverse set of data sources to unlock the most value. Appending transactional, behavioral and location data reveals new opportunities to uncover insights. These can then be translated into new product innovations and cross-device engagement pathways to ultimately drive sales.

• Close the Cookie Jar. Too often, marketers target devices and not people. This is due, in large part, to the historical reliance on cookies to identify previous traffic from a particular device. Consumers respond best to personalized, timely communications. Prioritize people as part of marketing efforts and recognize them at the identity level, instead of the cookie level. Tie everything back to an anonymized identity (i.e., identity resolution), and new opportunities arise to increase relevance and elevate engagement — all in the name of meaningful ROI and a superior brand experience.

• Data-Informed Measurement. When data helps drive critical business decisions, the effect is ultimately twofold: we seek out new data sources as the input mechanism for business efforts; and we become far more disciplined and uncompromising relative to the impression or delivery data that is output. This creates a cycle of learning, called closed-loop measurement, that can be recalibrated and applied over and over again.

Injecting data into closed-loop measurement not only precipitates higher performing marketing campaigns, but actually informs the continued performance of those campaigns as well. And higher performing marketing campaigns tend to equal optimized KPIs — whether that is sales, sign-ups, click-throughs, etc.

When brands put data in its rightful place — at the center of their company’s growth strategy — they find more effective ways to harness that data at scale.