Data-driven marketing and advertising; and how to harness new customer data insights

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So you’ve aligned all your objectives from campaign objectives – what you want to see at the end of the project. For example; awareness or increase in sales, to the overall company strategic objectives. However, despite having an amicable plan for your next big marketing and advertising project there’s often omission of the critical element(s) that should be at the top of your planning processes.

The customer insight

The customer insight – what is it that your target customers’ thinking or perspectives about your brand or company. But do you know how to get customer insights without breaking the bank? Focus groups or dipstick research doesn’t really give deep customer insights to fully inform a campaign. Often than not, these forms of research ooze soft insights. These are some of the shortcomings which hinder success for marketing and advertising campaigns.

Fortunately, we are now living in an era where there are vast sources for providing customer data insights that have great potential to assist in your planning processes with an upper hand. Personal data are raw opinions that when deciphered thoroughly can give you greater opportunities to be one step ahead of all your competitors.

Deep insights come from collecting the right customer data across the inevitable political, technological and organisational that can prevent your campaign from succeeding if you overlook or do it the wrong way. Customer data can build or break if fail to maximise them strategically.

That said planning process has to include everybody within the company, from the customer services people, the receptionist, to the social media manager and community manager, and product manager.

This will alleviate an element of assuming but rather know exactly what your customers see or think about your company, product or brand. Therefore, data sourced from across marketing, customer care, and transactions are the foundation of the first party insight which can be used to make the total human experience smarter and drive better outcomes of your marketing and advertising campaign. The customer will usually feel connected to the campaign once rolled out because your planning processes had immersed itself to understanding what makes them tick or frown.

Data insight accuracy is equally important throughout the planning stages hence using credible sources shouldn’t be overlooked as well. Notwithstanding that, while better approaches to data, technology, and operating models will enable brand marketers and advertisers to create smarter, more holistic experiences for customers, thus there is no room for losing sight of the role that creativity plays.

Hence, it's of paramount importance to understand the law and regulations surrounding the personal data protection especially when you get your data from a third party. Some prominent laws and regulations include the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and Protection of Personal Information (PoPI).

Becoming curators of the knowledge data provide

Data isn’t powerful without you really drilling deep in acquiring knowledge about it. Your work as marketer or strategist is to decipher customer data into its simplest form so that creatives or design architects will have it ready for them to implement or influence the conceptualizing processes for your next campaign.

That way you become the best user of the knowledge the data give us. Customer data will help you tell a personalised story. Today, customers are smart enough to decipher that campaigns or marketing efforts were design for them not with them.

Noah Khan, president of digital and innovation – CEE, Middle East and Africa, TBWA and DAN, summaries the importance of data insights:

Using data to support our positions removes subjectivity and allows us to focus on delivering disruptive work. We use data to provide insights, to validate a creative idea, to measure the impact our work is making, to optimise for even greater results, and to learn and build greater intelligence. In other words, data helps us reframe the conversation with our clients from 'I think' to 'I know'.