Benefits and Challenges of using Customer Data for Marketing

Decker (2020) defines Customer data as the information that customers provide while they are interacting with a company at offline or online avenues. Because of that, every increase in the level of relationship closeness between customers and companies make better results in terms of marketing strategy that helps every company to increase sales and profitability and simplify operations at the whole (Salesforce, 2020).

Martin N. (2018) for Forbes reported significant challenges in data-driven Marketing such as:

Firstly, having the overall strategy is crucial for a marketing department; there is a discovery from a survey that Campaign Monitor conducted where 81 % of marketers consider that having a sustainable data-driven strategy is highly problematic.

Secondly, it can be tough to find and recognise the right data and KPIs. Collecting data without analysing and finding a purpose is just a waste of time and money, and there is a lack of appropriate information as well. Think with Google (2017) highlighted, 26% of marketers said they didn't have the right analytics talent or enough of it where we can see how much data is not utilised conveniently. Besides that, other roadblocks can be connected with the lack of relevant platforms and tools as well as some kind of IT technologies. Lyer (2018) for Martech Advisor called the IT and marketers collaboration as ‘the least appealing option’ because of all challenges that they are facing in the real world.

Source: www.medium.com

By overcoming obstacles, Marketing has various benefits from the wide range of customer data. According to AMA Boston (2019), by creating data-driven strategies that fulfil customer needs and experience customer journeys, the data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to attain customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable. As a result, marketers will have precise customer segmentation based on geographic, demographic, or psychographic characteristics (Deshpande, 2019), as well as targeted marketing campaigns and improved customer relationships that customers are rewarding with their loyalty (Kokemuller, no date).

References:




Campaign Monitor ’Data-Driven Marketing Objectives & Challenges of the B2C Marketer’(no date). Available at: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/infographics/the-eye-opening-truth-about-data-driven-marketing/ (Accessed: 15 February 2020).

Canstello, D. (2019) ’How to Create an Effective Data-Driven Marketing Strategy’. Available at: https://amaboston.org/blog/how-to-create-an-effective-data-driven-marketing-strategy/ (Accessed: 15 February 2020).

Carey, C. (2017) ‘Dealing With Data: Today's Marketing Analytics Challenges and Opportunities’. Available at: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-apac/tools-resources/data-measurement/marketing-analytics-data-challenges-opportunities/ (Accessed: 15 February 2020).

Decker, A. (2020) ‘What’s a Customer Data Platform? ‘ Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-data-platform-guide (Accessed: 14 February 2020).

Deshpande, I. (2019) ‘What Is Customer Data? Definition, Types, Collection, Validation and Analysis’. Available at: https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/data-management/customer-data-definition-types-collection-validation-analysis-martech101/#section-v (Accessed: 15 February 2020).

Kokemuller, N. ‘The Advantages & Disadvantages of Database Marketing’ (no date). Available at: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-database-marketing-22810.html (Accessed: 15 February 2020).

Lyer, C. (2018) ‘3 Challenges with Big Data for Marketers’. Available at: https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/data-management/3-challenges-with-big-data-for-marketers/ (Accessed: 15 February 2020).

Martin, N. (2018) ‘How To Overcome The Challenges of Data-Driven Digital Marketing’. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2018/12/18/how-to-overcome-the-challenges-of-data-driven-digital-marketing/#397077424767 (Accessed: 15 February 2020).

Salesforce (2020). ‘What is CRM?’ Available at: https://www.salesforce.com/eu/learning-centre/crm/what-is-crm/ (Accessed: 14 February 2020).