Data-Driven Marketing Strategies to Watch in 2010
Published January 28, 2010
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Strategy #6: Embrace Analytics to Maximize Your Return on Marketing Investment
To best optimize your approach in 2010, you must maintain a focus on key metrics such as lifetime value (LTV) and return on investment (ROI). Carefully monitoring these metrics should serve to inform investment decisions and help answer key questions such as:
- How much should we allocate towards acquisition, retention, and win-back?
- What marketing mix maximizes my return?
- What is the allowable spend by segment?
And it goes without saying that businesses are looking at these metrics across the entire enterprise—not within product or business silos. While a 360-degree customer view should still be the goal for some given incomplete and/or fragmented data sets, master data management (MDM) is an increasingly popular paradigm for taking all the data in an enterprise and linking it to a single file that provides a common reference point or index.
Strategy #7: Test & Learn, Test & Learn, Test & Learn
Ongoing measurement, controlled testing, segment-specific performance and marketing mix evaluation are critical to success in 2010 and beyond. Although our increasingly dynamic marketing environment adds complexity to our jobs, the old adage still holds true: “If it can’t be measured, it can’t be improved.”
By maintaining a data-driven approach and using data and customer insight to drive communication strategies and plans, businesses will be positioned for success in 2010.
The McKinsey article suggests that, “Executives preparing their organizations to succeed in the new normal must focus on what has changed and what remains basically the same for their customer, companies, and industries. The result will be an environment that, while different from the past, is no less rich in possibilities for those who are prepared.”1
Now is the time for organizations to align themselves with the “new normal” and prepare to thrive with integrated data-driven marketing strategies. This will ensure that companies are not caught in the “blind spot.”
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Sources:
1 Davis, Ian. “The New Normal,” McKinsey Quarterly, March 2009.
2 White, Brian. “Best Buy Internal Demographics Training Manual Leaked,” BloggingStocks, March 19, 2008.
3 Gassman, Bill & Gareth Herschel. “Incorporating the Web Into Cross-Channel Customer Analysis,” Research Study, Gartner, November 13, 2009.