The amount of data we have is growing exponentially every day. News alert – that is not a trend! But, a marketer’s reliance on many external sources of data, as well as new rules and regulations, is also continuing to increase, and that is creating heartburn and panic in many senior marketing professionals.
The gap between what an organization owns and what it “leases”, buys or observes is becoming more prevalent. For example, if a consumer attends an event that your organization sponsored in the marketplace you sell to, do you have a right to contact that consumer? If you purchase a list of prospect email addresses and phone numbers, and that same person shows up to the event, but you discover they are also on a suppression list, can you still contact them? How do you know this information and how can you make important customer interaction decisions when you have multiple records on the same household or contact or inaccurate information?
Data and Data Management solutions go hand-in-hand to help personalize customer interactions and eliminate the risk to your organization with relevant, timely communications. By helping organizations create a reliable view of consumers, marketers can nurture marketing qualified leads (MQLs) into sales qualified leads (SQLs) with smarter interactions.
One major trend I’m seeing that relates to marketing’s reliance on data is the impact of externally created and obtained data manifesting itself in the changing role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO). Originally brought on as a data scientist to help assimilate Big Data into new repositories, CDOs today are being compensated for the value they extract from all sources of data.
But contact data is only the tip of the sword. Marketers are slowly being consumed by the volumes and variety of data from amongst other sources and social media. In reality the CDO’s task, in conjunction with the data consumers, is to help assess relevance of customer data, and in turn, assign value.
This now creates a type of “holy trinity” between the CMO, IT and the CDO to ensure that data management is positively impacting customer interactions.
by Len Dubois, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Trillium Software