If we put Archimedes' name in front of the reader, probably more than one will immediately relate it to one of the oldest, best-known and, if not the most accurate, then the most graphic scientific maxims: "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world". Perhaps with less grandiloquent intentions, but just as important for the future we face, today we could rephrase Archimedes with an expression inspired by the same principles: "Give me a datum and I will move the client of the COVID-19 era".
Data is the key to making smart business decisions. Its effective use is crucial to maintaining customer loyalty and generating new revenue streams. Data allows us to truly understand the changes that the market is heading towards, and today's market is more convulsed than ever by the impact of the pandemic. So if we don't use data we will be out of the game when it comes to understanding the consumer. In other words, we are out of the game when it comes to making smart business decisions. The "new normal", unsurprisingly, encourages the new business culture practices that were in place before the outbreak of the pandemic. It can be said that the new normal is now the unchecked emergence of the new practices that coexisted with the old normal. Part of this way of operating is data. Brands now more than ever before are called upon to capture data from customer interactions, both in apps, on websites and connected devices, as well as in response to email, social media, digital ads and other interactions using touchless channels.
With this context in mind, the consulting firm Forrester recently interviewed 750 marketing decision-makers from large companies in various industries in the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia and Japan. The research was conducted in partnership with the all-powerful Google, perhaps the company that is most profitably exploiting the data economy. In fact, the report is available for download from the American giant's own marketing platform, at this link. The results of this study have revealed that the volume of data is higher than ever, which is creating significant management problems for marketers. Added to this is the growing pressure regarding customer privacy and data security, which is a priority not only as a legal obligation, but also as an increasingly important demand from customers themselves.
It is a full-blown train wreck. On the one hand, the expectations and actions of the market. On the other, a processing capacity that still inherits practices such as the storage of data in different equipment and the lack of updating and capabilities of analysis tools that until just a few years ago had proven to be sufficiently capable.
Y a pesar de que 17 de cada 20 (84%) de estos responsables considera que el análisis multiplataforma es «crítico» o «muy importante», menos de la mitad (43%) tiene implementadas herramientas de análisis multiplataforma. Es decir: muchos responsables de marketing no cuentan con algo tan básico como una unificación de los datos de sus sitios web y las aplicaciones móviles. Siendo así, difícil es pensar que puedan hacerse con un big picture verdaderamente funcional.
Compared to this "privileged" percentage, 1 in 3 marketers have such data but it is scattered, 1 in 7 (13%) only have website analytics, 1 in 13 (7%) have it only from mobile apps, and, note, there is even a meagre 4% who are not supported by any kind of analytics platform. Mind you, 4% is small... but that's 1 in 25 marketers in the top 750 companies chosen by Forrester and Google for this survey.
When it comes to privacy and data protection, 13 out of 20 respondents (64%) say that their companies are expanding controls in these areas. While this is a significant percentage, the real sense of the importance given to this issue is that 1 in 2 (exactly 50%) say they would expressly welcome solutions that help unify user behaviour across platforms and devices in a privacy-safe way.
Another relevant contrast is when it comes to the incorporation of automation andmachine learning (ML) into their departments. Here, four out of five (80%) executives say that the ability to generate insights through machine learning is critical to their organisation's success, but only nine out of 20 (44%) rate their current efforts as "very effective". In other words, for more than half of senior executives at these 750 firms, their digital analytics solution lacks the machine learning and automation capabilities needed to achieve their marketing goals.
From this data, the reading from Forrester and Google is clear: the organisations using data most effectively are those that have invested in cross-platform tools, have adopted a privacy-centric mindset and are leveraging machine learning insights to create more relevant and engaging experiences for users. "As marketers move forward in this challenging and rapidly evolving environment, building these analytics capabilities into their organisation will provide valuable insights that will serve them well in the long run," they conclude.
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Text: app/ekmb
