If we mention the name Archimedes to readers, most will probably immediately associate it with one of the oldest, best-known and, if not most accurate, certainly most graphic scientific maxims: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world." Perhaps with less grandiose intentions, but equally important for the future we face, today we could rephrase Archimedes with an expression inspired by the same principles: "Give me a piece of data and I will move the customer in the COVID-19 era."
Data is key to making smart business decisions. Its effective use is crucial to maintaining customer loyalty and generating new sources of revenue. Data allows us to truly understand the changes the market is undergoing, and today the market is more turbulent than ever due to the impact of the pandemic. Therefore, if we do not use data, we will be out of the game when it comes to understanding consumers. In other words, we will be out of the game when it comes to making smart business decisions. The "new normal," as could not be otherwise, encourages the practices of a new business culture that were already emerging before the outbreak of the pandemic. It can be said that the new normal today is the unbridled emergence of new practices that coexisted with the old normal. Data is part of this way of operating. Now more than ever, brands are called upon to capture data from customer interactions, both in applications and on websites and connected devices, as well as in response to email, social media, digital ads, and other types of 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. This 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 marketing managers. Added to this is the growing pressure regarding customer privacy and data security, which are a priority not only as a legal obligation, but also as an increasingly important demand from customers themselves.
It's a full-blown train wreck. On one hand, there are market expectations and actions. On the other, there is a processing capacity that still inherits practices such as data storage on different devices and a lack of updates and analysis tool capabilities that, until just a few years ago, had proven to be sufficiently capable.
And despite the fact that 17 out of 20 (84%) of these managers consider multi-platform analysis to be "critical" or "very important," less than half (43%) have implemented multi-platform analysis tools. In other words, many marketing managers do not have something as basic as unified data from their websites and mobile applications. Given this situation, it is difficult to imagine that they can obtain a truly functional big picture.
Compared to this "privileged" percentage, 1 in 3 marketing managers have this data but it is scattered, 1 in 7 (13%) only have website analytics, 1 in 13 (7%) only have data from mobile applications, and, importantly, there is even a meager 4% who do not have the support of any type of analytics platform. Bear in mind that 4% is not much... but it is 1 in 25 marketing managers from 750 top companies chosen by Forrester and Google for this survey.
When it comes to privacy and data protection, 13 out of 20 respondents (64%) say their companies are expanding controls in these areas. While this is a significant percentage, the true measure of the importance given to this issue is that 1 in 2 (exactly 50%) say they would expressly welcome solutions that help unify user behavior across all platforms and devices in a privacy-friendly manner.
Another significant contrast can be seen in the incorporation of automation andmachine learning (ML) into their departments. In this case, four out of five (80%) executives say that the ability to generate knowledge through machine learning is critical to their organization's success, but only nine out of 20 (44%) rate their current efforts as "very effective." In other words, for more than half of the senior executives at these 750 firms, their digital analytics solution lacks the machine learning and automation capabilities necessary to achieve their marketing objectives.
Based on this data, Forrester and Google's interpretation is clear: the organizations that use data most effectively are those that have invested in multi-platform tools, adopted a privacy-focused mindset, and are leveraging machine learning insights to create more relevant and engaging experiences for users. "As marketers navigate this challenging and rapidly evolving environment, building these analytics capabilities within their organization will provide valuable insights that will serve them well in the long term," they conclude.
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Text: app/ekmb
