Gartner’s Chief of Research in Marketing Practice Ewan McIntyre says, “The current environment demands CMOs’ relentless focus on customer value, purposeful evolution of the marketing function, and continual optimization of brand value”.
How can CMOs deliver on the relentless pursuit of customer value while navigating the challenges of inflation and economic uncertainty, evolving consumer trends, competition, privacy concerns, and budget constraints?
To build a comprehensive understanding of customers, CMOs should focus on collecting and analyzing various types of customer data such as demographic data, behavioral data, feedback data, customer journey data, and engagement data.
The key to overcoming the numerous turbulences that come along the way is a unified view of customer data. Yet, managing and unifying large volumes of diverse marketing data sets, ensuring the data is trustworthy, and identifying meaningful patterns from the data deluge to fully understand a customer remains a formidable obstacle.
Table of Contents
Top 5 Data Challenges of Marketers
- Data Avalanche: From struggling with too little data, marketers now face a situation where they have too much data to deal with. Handling this large volume of first and third-party data is challenging.
- Trustworthiness of Data: Ensuring the data collected is high-quality is critical for accurate insights. Adulterated data is another great data challenge that CMOs and marketing leaders struggle to overcome.
- Turning Data into Action: The rapid influx of data also makes it increasingly difficult for marketers to create an action plan for transforming this information into meaningful insights.
- Unifying Diverse Datasets: Data silos are another big issue. Consolidating all information from different data sources such as HubSpot for CRM, SEMrush for SEO optimization, and Bambora for payment insights into a single platform is critical for Customer 360.
- Data Ethics and Privacy Concerns: The increasing need for personalization in this competitive market also makes protecting consumer privacy and ethically using data a top priority for marketers. Maintaining the balance between privacy and personalization can be a daunting task in today’s stringent regulatory landscape.
A Unified Data Analytics Platform: The Key to Modern Marketing Success
To address each of these data challenges and drive marketing data analytics, investing in a unified data analytics platform becomes a powerful solution. The integrated system transforms the end-to-end data lifecycle, eliminating data silos and streamlining analytics to provide a solid foundation for marketing excellence. Using a modern data system, marketers can leverage marketing automation and revolutionary generative AI, develop targeted messaging, and implement data-driven marketing strategies for positive outcomes. A unified data analytics platform can empower CMOs and marketers to:
- Adjust marketing strategies in real-time
- Deliver exceptional customer experiences
- Make data-driven decisions with confidence
- Optimize marketing spend and track ROI
- Build a stronger brand connection with customers
Leveraging a Unified Data Analytics Platform to Overcome Marketing Challenges and Drive Customer-centric Marketing
➤ Agility and Innovation
91% of CMOs say they must continually innovate to remain competitive according to the Salesforce State of Marketing Report.
A unified data analytics platform ensures prompt, accurate, and holistic marketing insights to fuel this innovation. These real-time as well as historical insights can empower marketers to experiment, learn, and adapt quickly to emerging trends, capitalizing on new opportunities for customer-centric marketing.
➤ Ideal Customer Profile
There’s a shift in marketing trends where CMOs and marketers are moving away from trying to reach customers everywhere. Instead, they focus on identifying and engaging their ideal customer profiles (ICP).
A unified data analytics platform with built-in advanced marketing analytics empowers marketers to closely monitor customer preferences, sentiments, and KPIs like Customer Acquisition Cost, Customer Lifetime Value, and Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). This becomes instrumental in forecasting, planning, and fine-tuning their marketing campaigns to reach out to their Ideal Customer Profiles more effectively.
➤ Single Customer View
The current economic slowdown demands marketers to highlight the value gained from their products/services in their marketing campaigns for customer loyalty.
With a unified data analytics platform enabling a Single Customer View, marketers gain a 360-degree understanding of customers, allowing them to sharpen campaigns with personalized, data-driven insights. This deeper customer knowledge reduces reliance on outbound reach by enhancing inbound engagement—attracting the right customers organically through tailored messaging, optimized customer journeys, and proactive retention strategies. By predicting customer needs, businesses can drive loyalty while minimizing customer churn.
➤ Strategic Resource Planning
Research shows that companies using unified data analytics platforms see a substantial increase in marketing ROI due to optimized resource allocation. Data-driven insights enable marketing teams to shift budgets from underperforming campaigns to high-performing initiatives.
A unified data analytics platform’s real-time functions provide 3600 visibility across multiple dimensions – customers, campaigns, digital assets, and trending topics. Marketing teams can track resource management, perform SWOT analyses, and monitor campaign performance on a granular level across all channels, including social media and SEO. This way they can easily analyze marketing spend, compare it against the marketing budgets, and adjust the allocated resources.
➤ Enhanced Collaboration
While the complex interplay of shifting consumer behaviors, economic fluctuations, and technological advancements continues, CMOs face the daunting task of ensuring profitability and business growth while navigating these challenges.
Cross-functional collaboration emerges as a pivotal strategy for winning over the disruptive market dynamics, and unified data analytics platforms are the key driver for this. With a well-built unified data analytics platform, all teams – product development, operations, and sales & marketing – can access the same data, fostering shared goals and metrics. Collective analysis of customer data leads to better communication, reduced instances of miscommunication, and informed decisions across departments.
In addition to the above mentioned, there are many other advantages of a unified data analytics platform, including:
- Easy integration with various third-party marketing platforms and tools.
- Complete control of your data, rather than relying on third-party tools.
- Freedom from vendor lock-in of your marketing data, ensuring flexibility.
Thinking Ahead Amidst Disruptive Market Trends
As a marketing leader, creating customer-centric marketing campaigns is paramount to sustaining the stiff competition. There is also a need to be agile when driving marketing initiatives to respond to the current market volatility.
Strategic adoption of a unified data analytics platform facilitates this customer-centricity and prompt adjustment to market dynamics. It empowers enterprises to leverage real-time insights to connect effectively with customers, catch up with emerging trends at speed, and accelerate their digital transformation goals.
KANINI enables enterprises to seamlessly embrace a unified data analytics platform aligned with their larger business vision. Organizations in banking and financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail are among the many sectors to unlock new opportunities for innovation in customer service, operations, governance, security, and compliance. By leveraging data-driven insights, businesses can enhance marketing effectiveness and drive sustained success. Speak to our experts to learn more.
Author
Anand Subramaniam
Anand Subramaniam is the Chief Solutions Officer, leading Data Analytics & AI service line at KANINI. He is passionate about data science and has championed data analytics practice across start-ups to enterprises in various verticals. As a thought leader, start-up mentor, and data architect, Anand brings over two decades of techno-functional leadership in envisaging, planning, and building high-performance, state-of-the-art technology teams.
