A customer intelligence program represents the nexus of data, technology, and marketing execution. When combined properly these three can unleash marketing – making it both measurable, which means it’s improvable, and accountable.
For the seasoned marketer this will ring familiar. Harkening back to the early days of CRM, there have been camps trumpeting the benefits and possibilities for data infused customer engagement. What has changed now, however, is the ubiquitous penetration of digital channels. Digital has unleashed the data; more data – more addressable data – than ever is now available to marketers who are willing to listen.
Today, launching a customer intelligence program is no longer the stuff of myth or legend. It’s actually pretty straight forward. Following, are five core steps to building an effective program.
1. Sales Related Behavioral Data
What this speaks to is the ability to measure marketers doing what marketers do. As such, everything needs to be relatable in some fashion back to revenue. A great way to model this is to start with a sale (or opportunity) and work backward through every touch made with a customer along their journey. This needs to cover everything – both inbound and outbound channels, such as:
- Digital Ad
- PPC
- Web browsing
- Downloads
- Webinars
- Demos
- Mentions
- Twits
- Link backs
- Etc.
At points in the past doing this represented a daunting task, but with the emergence of digital consumption, particularly in the B2B space this has grown pointedly easier. The more digital it is, the easier it is to track. This is also reflected in the emergence of the lead (or demand) generation software space that offers a hybrid between web analytics, email, and marketing automation. Not only do these systems facilitate cross channel tracking, but they also supply the all important, crucial, link to the SFA.
For more information on this space check out the listing at theMarketingMojo – http://themarketingmojo.com/2009/04/14/rankings-demand-generation/
2. Wide Customer Profiles
As basically a parallel stream to the behavioral data capture, the next phase addresses the development of a wide customer profile. In this context, “wide” refers to the number of discreet characteristics you can track about a customer – the more, the better. The wider you can make the profiles the better able you will be to interrogate the combined data to produce interesting result sets.
While knowledge of structured data design is important throughout the entire effort, it is especially important here. Quite a bit of the querying activity will be based upon the profiles. As such, the more normalized the data is, the more particular the questions can be. One goal when approaching the profiles is to leverage categorical fields wherever possible. These make great query sources.
Like it or not, this is where marketing needs to get some heavy lifting technologists into the game. As a quick test, make sure someone on your team can define the following:
Normalization is a systematic way of ensuring that a database structure is suitable for general-purpose querying and free of certain undesirable characteristics that could lead to a loss of data integrity.
Categorical Data is data that consist of only small number of values, each corresponding to a specific category value or label. Ask yourself whether you can state out loud all the possible values of your data without taking a breath. If you can, you have a pretty good indication that your data are categorical
3. Data Quality
Poor data quality is a major impediment to implementing a customer intelligence program. This is problematic for many marketing organizations because typically their emphasis is on quantity over quality… which totally makes sense. As marketers have come under heightened pressure to demonstrate their net contribution and without the ability to truly close the loop, the way many have reacted is by simply increasing their velocity. Like a flailing, drowning man, however, they are becoming their own worst enemy.
To avoid wasting time on non-profitable accounts and activities you need to develop a process for filtering out bad data. While this needs to be specific to your instance, it does not need to be complicated. Just keep a few key practices in mind, like:
- Choose a simple Master Key. What’s a key? It’s the way you can uniquely identify a specific record in the database. Think of it like a social security number. A couple of easy to implement approaches are to use either email address, or a combination of first name, last name, and company.
- Limit access to mass imports and updates. This is the fastest way to corrupt data. Also, someone trained in data integrity should be responsible for loading data.
- Setup a regular schedule for de-duping and purging bad records from the system. Best efforts aside, corrupted data will make its way into your database. Understand that up front and plan accordingly.
4. Sequencing Responsive Campaigns
Since the beginning the moniker of traditional campaigns has been episodic and very linear. We’ve all been trained on the staid recipe of develop your content, purchase your media, and blast your message out to as many targets as possible. What is so commonly discussed now and that we all are so painfully aware of is, however, that this approach no longer delivers like it used to.
So… the question is what’s next. All marketers are scrambling to figure out new ways to re-establish a connection with their target audiences. Without a doubt, one thing successful marketers will discover is that leveraging all available data to deliver a relevant, valuable message is crucial. Embarking on a customer intelligence program is the first step in this direction. If you’ve laid a solid data foundation and setup your “listening posts” you can be confident you can deliver a higher value message.
When you are ready to begin mapping out your interactions one thing to keep in mind is that you need to plan for both inbound and outbound campaigns. While thinking about inbound campaigns may represent a new way of considering your marketing activities, it can actually be an easier way to flow out some of your first branching sequences.
If you are interested in learning more about inbound marketing, check out some of the thought leadership at HubSpot:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/2989/Outbound-vs-Inbound-Marketing.aspx
5. Continuous Improvement
To get better at something, you need to be able to measure it. A slight bastardization of one of Peter Drucker’s famous maxims, but it still points to the fact that we measure so we can evaluate performance. Once you are tracking and structuring your interactions based upon a strong data foundation you now have the basis to begin measuring and benchmarking the performance of your marketing dollars.
Start with a basket of metrics, correlate them to revenue and begin running with them to see how they predict performance. Over time you will find certain ones don’t perform as expected. Replace them with new measures – be inquisitive and organic, over time your basket will change significantly. With that said, don’t lose sight of the main goal. The objective is to continually improve upon your measures or get them to a steady state that correlates to strong business growth.
When evaluating measures for your basket, make sure you cover all phases of your marketing activities. For a nice description of the phases, David Raab did a piece sometime back for Information Management (http://www.information-management.com/issues/20051101/1040160-1.html) that is worth checking out.
To reference Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/07/death-spiral.html), traditional marketers are trapped in a death spiral. No matter how fast they run, they are stuck on a wheel that has an inevitable conclusion. What is needed to break this cycle is a game changing shift in direction. Embracing a customer intelligence program can engender just this type of change. By establishing a strong data foundation, setting up “listening posts”, purging bad data, engaging on a sequenced basis, and beginning the process of measurement and continuous improvement marketers can reinvent themselves and reestablish relationships with their customers.
