Today’s marketers have more consumer data at their fingertips than ever before. As a matter of fact, the amount of data created by consumers doubles every two years. Yet, only 1% of it gets harnessed.

Imagine the value left on the table because the remaining 99% don’t get analyzed.

To inspire you how you could maximize your data and help you prioritize your data efforts, here’s a list of great opportunities primed for immediate implementation.

By the time you finish reading this piece, you will know the answers to the following questions:

• What are the common data roadblocks marketers face?
• What are the data must-haves in marketing?
• How can marketers implement these must-haves?

To prove that this isn’t merely lip-service to the latest trend, we will share our client’s success in leveraging advanced data analytics to increase the performance of their display ad campaigns by more than 30%.

Ready? Here are four upcoming must-haves for data-driven marketing every marketer needs to know and implement if they wish to take their data game to the next level.

The growing number of marketing tools we use to reach, communicate with, and learn from our audiences has created the challenge of having an easy-to-understand overview of how we are doing. To set goals and track their progress, marketing departments use a KPI (key performance indicator) metric that measures their performance over time for a specific objective. However, measuring the success of marketing campaigns with so many possible marketing KPIs can quickly lead to missing important data points and, thus, making decisions based on incomplete information.

A KPI dashboard has become the marketing manager’s best friend, enabling them to consolidate key actionable metrics in one place for a single-screen view and better decision-making.

How does it work?

A KPI dashboard is a visual reporting tool that translates vast amounts of data into an understandable format enabling actionable insights. Creating effective dashboards starts with collecting data from different marketing tools, organizing, filtering, and analyzing to ultimately visualize data and provide  an overview of marketing performance.

“The key challenge in building a KPI dashboard is two-fold. First, you need to understand how your KPIs are being calculated. This step is instrumental in achieving the understanding of what really matters to your business. The second step is identifying all your data sources that should be used in calculating the KPIs,” says Mateusz Pazdzior, dyvenia’s data engineering team lead.

Whether you wish to track the leads, social media engagement, CTR, or website traffic, a well-defined KPI dashboard brings all your marketing data together in one place. A bird’s-eye view of how well your marketing is doing reveals which marketing efforts are worth supporting, allowing you to make changes in marketing strategy and budget to save time and money.

With the proliferation of possible consumer touchpoints, today’s customer journeys are more complex than ever. Although the Marketing, Sales, and Support departments gather enormous amounts of information that pertains to a customer, this data tends to never leave its department’s silo. Thus, a single, end-to-end picture of the customer experience becomes impossible, costing marketers the opportunity to interact with customers in a personal way.

To overcome these challenges, marketing departments should seek solutions that will help them get to know their customers better by understanding their needs, behaviors, and motivations. A solution gaining more and more popularity is the customer data platform (CDP).

The CDP gathers all the data from multiple sources and  shapes a set of unique customer profiles. By merging data related to the same customer, the CDP gives you a 360-degree understanding of each customer. What’s more, the customer data is stored, giving you the ability to follow the customer journey over time.

“CDPs, however, expect clean data with unified customer records. Customer data might come from multiple sources like CRMs, websites, social media and ERPs. Cleaning and blending these multiple sources into unified customer profiles requires solid data engineering. To add to the challenge, some of this data preparation and modeling logic must be executed in realtime,” informs Alessio Civitillo, dyvenia’s CEO, about key CDP implementation challenges.

Gaining these meaningful insights allows marketers to deliver highly personalized messages to the right person, on the right channel, at precisely the right time. Thanks to the CDP, you can improve customer relationships, provide meaningful experiences tailored to customer needs, and reduce your campaign costs by making your targeting more efficient.

The adoption of data protection laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) plays a huge role in marketing activities, limiting the amount of customer data that marketers can collect and use. This particularly applies to third-party data, aggregated datasets obtained from external data providers, such as Acxiom, Experian, and CoreLogic, that don’t have a direct relationship with consumers. Following this shift, Firefox and Safari started blocking third-party cookies by default. By late 2024, Google will join their forces by eliminating the use of third-party cookies in Chrome.

For that reason, marketers need to look for alternatives, with first-party data being one of them. According to Google’s survey, 92% of marketing leaders believe using first-party data is critical to growth. First-party data is collected directly from your sources, such as Google Analytics, social media, mobile apps, or CRM systems. This data can include demographic data, purchase history, and interest among others. What’s important, first-party data complies with GDPR and CCPA regulations, as the entity collecting the data is the owner of consent. 

Because it is based on actual customer journeys, first-party data is considered to be the most valuable data asset. Having these unique insights empowers you to create highly personalized experiences and helps you differentiate yourself from competitors.

The importance of personalized experience is growing each year. Nevertheless, 63% of digital marketing leaders struggle with personalization. Why? According to Gartner’s survey, marketers see the processing and analyzing of consumer data as a major challenge, making it difficult to understand their customers’ needs, preferences, behavior, demographics, and socio-economic information.

Data-driven market segmentation is key to gaining insight into consumer behavior. It allows marketers to understand their consumers and their needs on a deeper level, giving them the essential information they need to personalize their engagement with a target audience. Such segmentation can be achieved in various ways by utilizing advanced data analytics capabilities. Key steps include combining different data sources, as well as developing and applying business logic based on audience characteristics.

“Personalized advertising requires a deep understanding of the audience, which starts with gathering and combining all available customer data from internal and external sources. With a unified view of the customer, marketers can create distinctive messages based on their customers’ characteristics, and thus improve their ad display campaigns,” says Kamil Krzyzanowski, dyvenia’s data analyst team lead.

One of our clients, VELUX, recognized the importance of harnessing the full power of data to offer a personalized advertising experience. They saw that the purchasing decision of their customers depended on several criteria, with customer location being the predominant one. For that reason, they decided to invest in a dyvenia team of advanced data analysts who helped them develop the data intelligence required to display a personalized message tailored to their customers’ location.

Want to learn more?

Click here to find out how we helped VELUX to increase the performance of their display ad campaigns by more than 30%.

As you can see, many ways can enable you to quickly respond to changes, target your audience more efficiently, and enhance customer experiences. Whether it is a KPI dashboard, a CDP, first-party data, or highly targeted communications you decide to implement, one thing is certain – the marketing world is changing so fast that there is no time to waste. Act now.