Confessions of a CMO
Marketing is the process of adding value to a company, and yet, we are failing to capitalise on our greatest asset: the data we are already collecting. GDPR didn’t kill consumer marketing; it forced us to step up our game and build brands worthy of customer consent.
A company’s success in competitive environments depends on its ability to measure, predict and respond to customer behaviour. Most marketing leaders would not dispute this and would go to great lengths to demonstrate their ability to anticipate what customers will do by hiring expensive market research firms to poke and prod at polls and panels. Grand ‘state-of-the-union’ style reports have their place, but it’s something we do annually.
Data analytics is a complex subject for marketeers. We love to talk about it, but we’re not statisticians or quantitative analysts. We love to talk about beautiful design, pithy slogans and give voice to our companies, but we are not forensic experts tied to the cold facts. We like seeing data back up our conclusions and dashboard that turn green, but we are not the ones that enjoy inserting tracking tags into every touchpoint and setting up those charts.
It is complex for marketing leaders to extract value from first-party data even with dedicated teams. It is complex to build systems that can extract, process and visualise data, let alone analyse marketing data at scale, and in real-time. Perhaps most complex of all, is the issue of drawing meaningful conclusions from the data we are already amassing.
The richest source of customer behaviour is probably something that we are already tracking but do not know what to do with. The problem is not collecting the data; it’s making sense of it. It is knowing how to process data at scale and create new systems of information management that allow marketing operators to make changes quickly. Data literacy doesn’t provide competitive advantage, it’s about the ability to respond quickly.
The vast majority of companies are only at the beginning of their data journey. There are myriad tools out there – ranging from keyword scanners to machine learning APIs – but it all requires an investment of time and knowledge that we can seldom afford. You see, as marketing directors, managers and operators, we have the same hours in a working day as the engineers and analysts, but dedicated to a very different area of the business.
I’m cash-rich, time-poor. I’m media savvy, but data illiterate. I know that what gets measured, gets managed, and I can’t manage this myself. I’m every CMO everywhere.
And that’s why Lumilinks has developed a technology solution that ingests the first-party data you’re already collecting from Google or Facebook or Salesforce in a few clicks. Using algorithms designed by our data-science team of PhDs, the software processes and visualises the data clearly. It provides a list of actionable recommendations that your marketing teams, without any prior training of the platform, can implement quickly. You can use Lumilinks to bring transparency to reporting across multiple agencies, and use the same technology to reduce ad waste, improve conversions and attribute events accurately… So, why choose Lumilinks as your data science partner?
It’s a proven technology backed by some pretty powerful case studies.
It’s free to try – you can request an audit which is quick to set up with no downtime.
You own your data, we follow GDPR best practice and you are in control.
Our customer support is second to none; we say what we mean and do as we say.
So, it’s time to ask yourself, when is a click just a click? It’s about time you found out.