The Data Play

The festive season is now done and dusted, and businesses are starting to gain traction heading into 2020. I thought back to my time in financial services and remembered the amount of transactional data that would filter through the banking system, especially over the festive season. Data was and is critical to business success. Data about customers allows marketers to deepen their engagement with the customer and ultimately, this drives business growth.

Five years ago, organisations were preparing for POPI and other regulation that would impact how marketers handle customer data. The rules in this new decade seem even stricter forcing marketers to work more dynamically.

There are some basics though to using your data profitably. Firstly, data does not solve all your business problems. It is not a silver bullet. Data is part of the journey to better understanding your customer, which leads to better marketing. 

How though?

Once you have found a problem that data could help with, you turn to your first-party data, and you dig deep. "Your Data" is where you can dive as deep as you need too. Regulations are different for 3rd party data, and so you have space to understand the data at your disposal fully.

Create a view of your customer and augment that view with the data you have. Call a friend in IT to talk about where the data lives and how to make that data more accessible for marketing teams. As the picture becomes more apparent, your marketing message improves, which results in a higher impact with your customer.

The above steps are the easiest way to explore your data capability, but as I have seen, most elementary steps lead to the most significant gains. Using the insights gained as building blocks, you could quickly evolve into much more complex solutions. 

Marketers have to make the journey into the data world if marketing is to be core to business growth in this new decade.