New Year, New Data-Related Capabilities

December 7, 2020December 7, 2020 Stan

As 2020 winds down, many of us will be thinking about 2021 budgets and how to invest our marketing dollars. At the very least, we will begin researching what new things are on the horizon. I’ve spent much of this year talking about data governance tools and practices, but I want to expand on the related capabilities worth considering when it comes to your data as we approach the new year.

Big Data

You’ve probably heard of Big Data, but are you using it yet? Big Data is more than just a big set of data. It’s an immense volume of information that requires computational analysis to withdraw insights. This vast spectrum of insights can be output into a wide variety of data points, providing both structured and unstructured data. Big Data has huge potential for playing a role in your digital marketing strategy as it provides marketers with a tool to not only analyze past trends en masse, but also to envision your customers upcoming behaviors. Big Data technologies, like Cloudera, allow marketers to engage audiences at the individual’s level and even provide personalized customer experiences by campaign – not by personalizing a 1:many campaign with field merges and dynamically populated content, but by automatically generating a true 1:1 marketing campaign. Now that is the real future of data. If Big Data is a step too big for you, then take a look at intent data.

Intent Data

You already rely on visitor data to form insights into web performance, but your visitor data only captures activity on your websites. What about the web activity outside of your website? Many third-party providers, like Bombora, capture and aggregate digital activity from all over the web with the intent of collecting these activity-based data points in order to produce an output or baseline. That output can then be used in conjunction with proprietary algorithms to identify a score for each company in your database for each topic you define, based on the amount of content previously consumed, the number of content consumers, the type of content consumed, the amount of time they spent consuming that content and even data points as minute as the scrolling speed with which they consumed it! With this kind of intent data captured and scored in your database, you can then tailor the communications to your prospects based on their current progress in the buyer’s research journey. If you want to take Intent Data a step further, consider a CDP.

Customer Data Platforms (CDP)

A CDP, like Oracle’s Unity, creates a single, unified, 360-degree view of your customers by combining all the customer data you have into one manageable profile. This takes into account all data sources, looking beyond your typical First Name, Last Name, Email etc. and going further, including not only their purchase history but also their entire online behavior, including every email they’ve ever clicked, every website they’ve ever visited and anything else you capture. This unified and comprehensive data source not only brings the data together in one place but makes it actionable for applied intelligence and generating insights to better improve your B2B or B2C experience.

Our marketing is only as good as the data we have available to us. Improving upon the data we have is paramount for improving our reach and understanding our customers. By ensuring it’s all in one place for a truly comprehensive view, extrapolating future intent based on current and past behavior, or even by relying on machine learning and AI to do some of the heavy lifting for us, we capitalize on our insights. Regardless of the mechanisms and new strides forward, it always comes back to the data in hand, and data governance plays a large role in ensuring it’s all possible. If you’re planning for data governance, and need guidance on where to start, Relationship One is always here to help.

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