Personalization is key to tapping into customer loyalty, but you’re leaving them cold if you’re not working with unified data.
It’s increasingly clear that marketing is nothing without personalization. But personalization is nothing without data collection and unification across the enterprise. So it’s pretty unfortunate that a recent VB Insight report found that 96 percent of marketers generally have no idea how, or where, to start.
And that’s a problem, says Rishi Dave, CMO of data insights and analytics powerhouse Dun & Bradstreet.
“That’s a big hole I see today,” Dave says. “CMOs say, ‘oh you know that data thing, that’s not my problem.’ Or, ‘I don’t want to invest in that, that’s a back office thing.’ And that,” he says, “is a big miss.”
The C-level position has got to evolve, Dave says. A successful CMO can’t just consider brand or creative anymore, but has to work on driving the corporate strategy. And because every company is a technology company now, the CIO needs to be thinking the same way. The CIO can’t just focus on the data center or tech infrastructure. They need to consider how technology fundamentally drives the company’s corporate strategy.
Even more important: “When the CMO and CIO are working together on that common corporate strategy,” Dave says, “and are agreeing on it, they’re jointly driving metrics and growth around that agenda.”
The foundation of that agenda is data. But when that data is spread out across the organization, it hinders analysis into who their most valuable customers are, how they should serve them, when opportunities arise to serve them better or renew their relationship with them, and what type of risks they have in their customer and supplier base. Without a complete picture, he warns, you lose potential revenue, or even lose customers outright.
It’s crucial that the CMO and CIO work together to figure out who the big stakeholders are who generate data and need data to make decisions, what data they’re generating, and where it’s going, plus deciding what key aspects of that data need to be tied together across the organization. From there the CMO has a 360-degree view into customer experience, and can use it to not only drive the marketing strategy, but deliver feedback to the CIO to help continually refine their technology strategy and tool implementation.
In the end, Dave says, data unification almost boils down to a simple equation. “There’s a little bit of geeky around the data,” Dave says, “but there’s also a lot of organization and working together — and both of those things are very important.”
For more nitty-gritty insight into what data unification is, why it matters, and how to get there, join Venture Beat analyst Andrew Jones and Rishi Dave, CMO of Dun & Bradstreet in our free interactive web event.
Don’t miss out!
In this interactive web event, you’ll:
- Unlock the customer data that you’re missing today
- Streamline your identity process, including detail-rich demographic information often overlooked
- Hear insider secrets for getting that personalized message hit the customer right in the sweet spot — driving serious bank to your bottom line
Speakers:
Andrew Jones, Analyst, VB Insight
Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO, Mozilla
Moderator:
Wendy Schuchart, Moderator, VentureBeat
This webinar is sponsored by Janrain.