In this series, brought to you by FiveStones and our Google Marketing Platform consultants, we explore the different aspects of Digital Marketing Maturity, providing actionable insights for you and your organisation to achieve multi-moment marketing and higher ROI from your marketing spend.
In today’s ever-changing world, prospects and customers expect unique, tailored experiences more than ever which means businesses must create personalised journeys that resonate to maximise conversions with their marketing and advertising spend. With the benefits of applying a data-driven mindset well established, Data-driven Marketing is something that marketing leaders are using to achieve higher ROI and better results from their marketing and ad activities in these complex and uncertain times.
What is Data-driven Marketing?
Data-driven Marketing is the process of using data, typically prospect or customer behaviours, to make marketing decisions. This can include understanding, informing or predicting the needs, desires and future behaviours of these potential customers, to influence them into taking a particular action through personalised offers.
“Nearly 2/3 of leading marketers say that decisions made with data are superior to those based on gut instinct”
What are the benefits of Data-driven Marketing?
As part of our previous blog on applying Data-driven Marketing Mindsets, we highlighted that data-driven organisations are 3x more likely to record substantial improvements in decision-making. Further to this, Research conducted by the Boston Consulting Group commissioned by Google, identifies that organisations who focus their efforts on a full path to Data-driven Marketing and Attribution can achieve cost efficiency savings of up to 30% and an increase in revenue of up to 20%. This is achieved alongside the following additional benefits of Data-driven Marketing:
1. More granular segmentation of your audience
2. Highly personalised and targeted marketing
3. Enhance customer experience and engagement
4. Understand and target customer intent based on behavioural signals (in real-time) using strategies such as Dynamic Remarketing
5. Improve the quality of your ads
6. Improve Attribution or the allocation of credit against each of your marketing campaigns and channels
7. Standardise and consolidate information across different departments within the business
8. Make informed marketing and business decisions
9. Achieve higher ROI from your marketing and ad spend
10. Achieve efficiencies by leveraging automation
Personalising creative through Data-driven Marketing
As a subset of Data-driven Marketing, Data-driven Creatives (or DDC) leverage customer insights to personalise an ad creative’s look and feel for different customer segments and deliver more effective digital advertising campaigns.
Not to be confused with Dynamic Creatives which can be interchanged at any time, the application of Data-driven Creative combined with machine learning and automation (Dynamic Creative Optimisation) allows for mapping of creative to buyer personas and predictive intelligence, determining ad performance and purchase intent that is based on past campaign data or recent online activity.
With research from Google Media Lab showing that 70% of campaign performance comes down to creative, it’s important for digital marketers to get right and power with data-driven insights.
“More than six in 10 marketers (63%) indicated that analytics was in their top five priorities” over the next 12 months, with 17% saying that to “improve our use of data and analytics” was a top priority
Data-driven Marketing in a cookieless world
As one of the biggest challenges affecting advertisers, the blocking of third-party cookies by safari and firefox, and subsequent blocking on Chrome by 2021 means that marketers will need to look at alternative methods for targeting their audiences. While “47% of consumers would sacrifice privacy to get a better deal” according to the Pew Research Centre, the introduction of GDPR a few years ago reflects the growing concerns about data collection and privacy from advertisers. The importance of advertisers respecting the privacy of consumers has been reflected in the recent Deloitte Australian Privacy Index 2020 report with 93% of consumers expecting a service to provide them with the option, upfront, to opt-in to non-essential uses of their personal information.
“77% (of organisations)...say their commitment to addressing technology advancements is much higher than two years ago”
Importantly, marketing leaders are looking to their technology, and more specifically their Ad Technology platforms in developing their audience targeting in a privacy-safe way within a cookieless world. The Google Marketing Platform provides a range of targeting alternatives to third-party cookies across Digital Media and Paid Search, including Google Audiences such as in-market and affinity, proximity targeting and Remarketing strategies using Google’s Global Site Tag just to name a few.
In addition to this, for enterprises and more advanced organisations, Ads Data Hub allows you to leverage a Google-owned BigQuery project within the Google Cloud Platform to match anonymised user IDs from your ads and analytics data against your other data sources including your CRM (such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud) and third-party DMPs.
“The top 100 most mature marketers on the maturity curve are 4X as likely to exceed business goals, increase market share, and increase revenue”
Source: Think With Google
How Data-driven Marketing and Digital Marketing Maturity intersect
With the second round of Digital Marketing Maturity research from the Boston Consulting Group identifying five dimensions and six enablers for driving Data-driven Marketing, elevating an organisation through the four stages of Digital Marketing Maturity is a structured approach for organisations that want to achieve the cost and revenue benefits from multi-moment marketing associated with the Digital Marketing Maturity framework.
Importantly, this is reflected through 70 question Digital Marketing Maturity assessment which is then broken down into a Digital Marketing Maturity score for an organisation and for each of the five dimensions (also known as the 5 A’s) – Access, Assets, Attribution Audience, and Automation.
Case Study - How a custom Google Data Studio dashboard for our global Financial Services client lead to achieving ‘Connected’ Maturity for data exploration in Google Analytics
Objective
Build an all-encompassing custom dashboard for Google Analytics data in Google Data Studio for our leading, global financial services client to:
- Build more detailed and granular data internally as part of the client’s data-driven focus
- Develop a visual medium to allow for more easily interpreted and digested insights
- Having a comprehensive understanding of creative performance from digital media campaigns
- Achieve ‘Connected’ Maturity for the client’s Google Analytics license under Data Exploration of the Analysis dimension within the Digital Marketing Maturity Framework
Approach
- Build a dashboard for visualizing data
- Set up a scoring scheme for goals measurement
- Business-oriented tracking plan
- Implemented Google Tag Manager and the data layer to facilitate this
Results
- Has a scorecard to monitor media placement allowing for the benchmark of further optimisation
- Save time on report generation resulting in more resources being available for generating insight and taking action
- Tracking that has been set up based on business requirements with business KPIs easily monitored
While there isn’t necessarily a tangible ROI result from implementing a Google Analytics dashboard in Google Data Studio, the client has made this a regular part of their daily processes, leveraging the Data-driven Marketing Mindsets that the research from the Boston Consulting Group and Google reinforces (see above) and therefore, becoming an integral part of the client’s data-driven culture.
Importantly, as the step to achieving ‘Connected’ Maturity for Data Exploration within the ‘Analysis’ dimension of Digital Marketing Maturity Framework, implementing this solution directly corresponded to our client developing the maturity of their Google Analytics license and organisation, allowing the capability to leverage the insights extracted for further implementation of Digital Marketing Maturity in the future.
Conclusion
While Data-driven Marketing is not necessarily a new concept, marketing leaders are increasingly using it to drive cost efficiency savings and increased revenue growth with research from Boston Consulting Group and Google reinforcing this.
Importantly, when applying a Data-driven Marketing Mindset, it’s critical that advertisers ensure they are targeting their audiences in a privacy-safe way with many organisations looking to their Ad Technology to drive this. Platforms such as the Google Marketing Platform provide a variety of alternative data-rich alternatives to third-party cookies as well as opportunities to leverage Data-driven Creative to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing and ad spend.
For more information on how you can leverage Data-driven Marketing within the Google Marketing Platform or for more information on the Digital Marketing Maturity Framework including how to get an assessment for your organisation, please contact your local FiveStones team today.