Why future of marketing for large enterprises lies in digital transformation

Marketing always had to be agile, and this is truer with the shorter planning cycles and quicker expectation of results in the post covid world. Large enterprises have their own corporate expectations from marketing like audit-friendly marketing processes, budget controls, compliances, transparency and ROI.

The future of marketing for large enterprises lies at the confluence of these two. One aspiration of marketing is to bring analytics systemically inside the marketing process so that decisions are quick and based on data. On the other hand, corporates want best-of-breed process automation with real time budget control and audit compliance from their marketing teams.

The future lies in dedicated workflow automation for marketing departments of large enterprises which ensure flexibility and controls. All business decisions must be data-driven and measurable today. Similarly, marketing investments need to be measured scientifically to ensure ROI.

Marketing data lake

Imagine an IT structure which can absorb & hold unlimited amounts of data inside an elastic data store. The Data Lake is a repository which expands automatically, adding storage as and when required. Simultaneously ensuring minimum consumption of expensive server and storage hardware.

The use of a Data Lake is clear in digital marketing. Vast amounts of data is available in near real time for every digital campaign. This data is analyzed and new follow-up campaigns are created and launched for each consumer. To be effective, a Marketing Data Lake must necessarily include data that covers the entire spectrum of marketing activities and investments. And ideally extend to sales, competition, market research and more.

A Marketing Data Lake acts as a home to all your data pertaining to marketing activities, investments and their outcomes. It must be available on a real time basis.

Large enterprises investing significantly in marketing, must have a plan to create and maintain their Data Lake. This is the only way to ensure that the organization becomes data driven, and digitally transforms their marketing department. It must store data pertaining to sales, promotional offers, pricing changes, competition data, etc.

The Data Lake should immediately increase the visibility of marketing data by 100% by showing ongoing and past marketing investments & their outcomes through various live dashboards for executives & the C Suite. These quick-reporting dashboards should present the true picture of marketing investments and activities.

The huge, updated data set should increase the frequency of analytics exercises. The regularly updated data set will make it feasible for testing and building analytics algorithms to increase efficiency and set directions for marketing. Data from previous years can be used for building analytics models and algorithms.

The Marketing Data Lake should be linked to an Analytics Platform which hosts multiple existing and in-the-pipeline models which feeds in on past and present data.

Customer Data Platform

As it evolves, the Data Lake will receive data on digital customer behaviour, which must be ‘stitched’ with the offline marketing data. This will ensure a 360 degree view of the customer, optimal targeting with minimum duplication in target audiences. This may balance the high dependency on Google and Meta, and even slow down their increasing rates. This will address the increasing concerns of consumer data privacy, by replacing the ‘cookie’ with first-party data.

The Marketing Data Lake can then behave as a Customer Data Platform, based mainly on first-party data.

Conclusion

The future of Marketing for large enterprises lies in the digital transformation of their Marketing Departments, which could be achieved in 3 steps:

· Introduce Audit-friendly, Cross Enterprise, Unified Marketing Processes

· Get the big picture from Your Marketing Data Lake

· Be future ready with a Customer Data Platform

(Biswajit Das is Founder, BrandIntelle Services Pvt Ltd-a centralized marketing platform)

Published on: Saturday, April 30, 2022, 03:34 PM IST