NEXT STEPS

Marketing organizations are under pressure to cut costs and deliver ROI, and they must increasingly rely on advanced analytics tools. These tools can help marketers reallocate spend across channels based on actual revenue impact; personalize content, offers, and experiences in real time to increase customer lifetime value; improve product recommendations and category affinity scores; and harness predictive analytics to mitigate risk of churn.

Storing customer data in a single, queryable location is key to ascending the maturity curve. Organizations can begin by following three basic steps:

1. Ingest from data sources

Marketing organizations should procure an ETL tool with prebuilt connectors so they don’t have to rely on their engineers for ongoing maintenance.

2. Store the unified data

Companies need a single platform that can natively support semi-structured and structured data in the same system and the concurrency and scalability requirements of all marketing workloads.

3. Make the data accessible to business users

To be useful, analytics must be widely available to users beyond a small group of data scientists and data analysts. If business users must submit an IT ticket whenever they want to see real-time campaign data or combine data sources, the effort to harness advanced analytics is doomed.

Scaling from basic to advanced marketing analytics can require a significant investment of time and resources, but if an organization methodically unifies customer data and enables a 360-degree view of customers, it can build data products that deliver significant ROI. Executed correctly, advanced analytics will empower marketing teams to make data-driven decisions in real time that dramatically improve campaign performance and business outcomes.