How having a connected data strategy benefits every team
So you’re tagging all of your marketing campaigns with tracking information and storing that source information on customers and leads in a marketing database. What next?
You already have access to lots of data on campaigns and adopting a data driven approach comes naturally when there is so much information available to help optimise your day to day. But what if we had more information on a lead further down the funnel, or if this one system talked to that one and we could find out the next thing they did with our product. We could find the best customers and that would take our marketing efforts to the next level.
“Start optimising campaigns to real business goals, instead of just clicks, leads and other top of the funnel vanity metrics”
Indeed it would. Marketing have the big budgets and are measured on driving business growth, so it’s only right that they are the ones leading the charge for more data connectivity throughout a business. But it can be difficult to persuade the wider business to invest the effort to break down the data silos that exist between teams.
Marketing teams are the voice of a company, not just for telling the wider world about your product, but also for their own internal promotion and securing the buy-in they need to lead change. If you can get everyone on board with the benefits to connected data, that’s the start you need.
Sales
The divisions between marketing and sales can run deep. With lead quality and lead conversion the main battlegrounds. It need not be this way. A connected marketing and sales team working with the same data can, with agreed metrics for success, standardised reports and regular catchups between the two, ensure alignment on what campaigns are working, what content is being read, where and who the best leads are, when they should be passed over to sales and much more. Sales teams can have much more effective conversations if they are up to speed with what is being tracked in the CRM systems, what journey a prospect has taken to that point. And as a byproduct have more faith in the leads being gathered by marketing. And marketing can tailor their campaigns to the leads that are driving real business goals, instead of just clicks and other top of the funnel vanity metrics.
Customer Support / Customer Success
Customer success and support teams are on the front line with your customers and users. By connecting those systems together, they’ll know what emails a certain person has received, or even what their journey has been to that point, increasing the likelihood of a positive outcome. Marketing teams should also think about suppressing marketing communications to people with open support tickets. The last thing you want to do is use all of this data to send a personalised email to a customer who is unhappy with you at that point in time, potentially losing them forever.
Engineering / Development
At some point, if you haven’t already, you’ll likely need some level of development or engineering support to implement a bit of software in your Marketing Tech stack, or gather a new bit of data from your app. Making sure they know the benefits to the business of marketing tracking is going to be key to getting time in busy backlogs and workflows. And feeding back to them to show what impact that work, or piece of software has had on the business is crucial to preventing marketing from just being a black hole of budget and engineering work that never sees the light of day.
Product / Business Analysts
Product / BA teams are always looking for ways of improving the product that they have. Aligning on conversion funnels, experiments and and sharing data to find who the best customers and users are and optimising for them is another way you can grow as a data driven business. Within the same connection, marketing can use product data to feed back into campaigns. One basic example could be unlocking push notifications or emails based on during certain triggers within the product. But take it to the next level, connect those teams data silos together and you’ll find out who are the strongest users, referring the most people and what channel or campaign they came from so you can go out and spend marketing budget on getting more of them.
“There are tech, time and money barriers to breaking down data silos. But by doing so, having that one source of truth and becoming a data driven business doesn’t just power up a marketer’s day to day, it brings tangible benefits to everyone.”
Need help on adopting a data driven approach in your marketing team or business?
