Especially by people coming from finance or economics backgrounds it has been regarded as a discipline of unnecessary presentations on products and services that no one wants to buy, and strategies to do everything to sell these products, even if at the expense of cheating and deceiving the consumers.

For committed marketers, marketing has been the perfect intersection of creative and analytical thinking - where you need to be good at both to become the best. Still, it was regarded as a nonsensical discipline, considered to be a lesser, kindergarten form of sales - which is annoying but at least necessary and effective.

 

And then data came along. It started subtly, with analytics and reporting. Then technology made it possible to collect and structure more and more of it, and it also facilitated the use of it. Big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning came to the rescue of marketing and it changed the scenery.

It didn't just change the scenery from the disciplines and technology point of view, but it reshaped how consumers act and behave.

We heard it a million times: we live in the age of the digital customer who wants everything, immediately, and who is more powerful and merciless than ever. We are fighting our battles for them because they are our most important assets.

Translated into marketing language the digitally aware customer of our days wants an integrated, 360 degree, omnichannel experience at their fingers when they want it, but only when they want it.

The customer is no longer part of the target group, the customer is an individual. So instead of standardisation, we talk about customer personas and perfectly targeted messages.

 

Sounds very scary and seems downright impossible. To be able to deliver this close-to-miracle omnichannel experience we need a bunch of things: we need to know our customers, we need to collect their data on each and every platform we are connected to them, we need to listen to them. Then we need to aggregate the data, create the appropriate personas that are personalised enough to be effective, but general enough to be profitable. We need to create individual customer journeys, to create the right messages that can convey our values and our brand but is still useful for our audience. And we need to do it at the right time, in the right place. We need to care about all the problems of our customers, to guess their next step, to find out their next wish, to recommend them the next solution before they even realise that they are looking for it.

In short: we need to live with them, breathe them in, they need to be the first thing we think of in the morning and the last at night. And it is all possible, we just need data for it.

 

“In God we trust. All others must bring data.” – W. Edwards Deming

 

Data is everything.

Data analytics has changed marketing significantly because it changed the status quo. Instead of the brands, now it's the age of the empowered consumer, the digitally aware customer - they are the drivers of the market, they are in power, they hold the key to the success or failure of a brand.

This changed the expectations toward marketing leaders and rearranged the setup, introducing new requirements, new skillsets, new disciplines.

Let's see how it changed the setup:

#1 Data offers detailed insights of customers

Today’s customers are more aware, more powerful than they have ever been. Not only your direct competitors but players of other fields have taught them that they can expect everything — so this is exactly what they do. They are taught by brands and companies that they matter; they deserve to be satisfied, and more so, they even deserve their expectations to be surpassed. They have the power to lift up or drag down your business with a single comment or rating, they have the option to look for alternatives if you don’t serve them right, and there are alternatives to be found.

Today it's not enough to do a better job than your competitor and all-time rival, today you need to provide the perfect customer experience, that your customers expect.

And the only thing that will help you in this is data, and the appropriate use of data. Whatever the consumer is doing online leaves a data point to track and act upon. It not only shows where they are, what they interact with; when they are most likely to be perceptive to a certain type of information, but with the right use of data and further technology, it is possible to predict their next move, based on trends, tendencies and past behaviour.

Thanks to analytics, consumer behaviour patterns are easier to notice. Intent data refers to all the signals that buyers make when they are getting closer to purchase or another type of commitment. The digital footprint morsels such as reading on the subject, checking out websites for information, comparing services, downloading report are giving clear indications on the behavioural changes of the customers. This is when data goes hand in hand with creativity - data shows you the right person, the right time and the right place, marketing needs to find the right attractive and outstanding message to create the sales

Data allows marketers to change their storytelling on the go. Digital storytelling is based on interaction and engagement - data in its purest form - therefore it also allows to tweak and change the narrative to meet the needs of the audience.

It also allows to incorporate user reviews and reactions into product and service development, improvement of user experience and user interface (as known as UX and UI) - to maximise customer engagement

“Data are just summaries of thousands of stories – tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful.” – Chip and Dan Heath

#2 Data allows marketing to prove its impact

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”. John Wanamaker

John Wanamaker (1838-1922) was a very successful United States merchant, religious leader and political figure, considered by some to be a "pioneer in marketing”. He opened one of the first and most successful department stores in the United States, which grew to 16 stores and eventually became part of Macy’s.

His phrase was haunting marketers for decades. If you are old enough then you will know it from experience, if not, then you can imagine the marketing budget and ROI discussions before the boom of data - it was mostly guesswork, hoping and crossing fingers based on supposed correlations and coincidences.

Now we don't need to rely on conclusions based on vague and imprecise guesswork such as “we advertised last week, and sales increased so it must have worked” or “the objective was awareness and clearly many people are now aware of us”. Today this just does not cut it anymore.

It's long gone when we defined roughly segmented target audiences and placed an ad hoping someone would purchase something. Today’s marketing enables us to identify our exact target audience and to get to know them right down to an individual level. What’s more, we can personalise and customise our advertising and messaging to each specific person, no matter how many people there are. We can even customise and personalise website pages depending on who’s viewing them.

We don't need opinions anymore to prove marketing's worth, we don't need it to be a cost centre anymore when we can prove with the help of data the leads and the turnover deriving directly from each campaign.

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” – Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CE

And what's even more than that: predictive data analytics can also give guidance to how the marketing investments are going to be most effective. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are arming marketing with further technology arsenal to become more powerful within the organisation, to serve the customers better, to generate more sales and contribute more openly to the overall company success.

#3 Data made the marketing process more efficient

Finally, we often forget that internal processes, the synergy between departments, aggregation of internal data, visualisation of them in a comprehensible way - this is all part of the evolution of marketing and it is all crucial to making the best business decisions. Technology allows us the more intelligent use and distribution of data and marketing systems, from workflow management, asset and content management, collaboration tools and approval processes, tracking and monitoring of campaigns.

This is all achieved through very intelligent, extremely cost-effective digital techniques, advanced marketing automation, modern website technologies, social media, the convergence of inbound and outbound marketing and most importantly, encased in a solid depth of understanding of the principles of marketing.

This is how the universal access to quality data turns marketing into a combination of deep strategy, precise, measurable science, cutting edge technology, advanced psychology, sociology and statistics and of course execution through beautiful, engaging and creative art form. Successful marketing today is where data-driven science and art intersect to deliver superior results.