Data can be a powerful tool for marketers around the world. By leveraging customer and prospect data, you can drive successful campaigns that resonate with your audience in exciting new ways.
But before you can effectively leverage this data, your organization needs to have the right data Strategy in place. As Drew Donaldson—content and data strategist and founder of GroHaus, a consulting firm focused on helping businesses develop organic content and data strategies—points out, this strategy must address three main challenges:
“Most organizations collect data on video views, web site visits, downloads, etc., only to find that they are unable to effectively leverage the collected data for marketing campaigns, management insights, or even simple trend analytics,” Donaldson stressed following his presentation at Brightcove’s most recent annual PLAY conference.
“To make the most of the data we collect—and not spend countless hours manually creating reports that are not all that meaningful—organizations need to bite the bullet and establish a strategy for managing data. This first step can be a heavy lift, but it is critically important in order to begin using data to drive marketing.”
In order to make the most out of the data you collect, you need to have the necessary governance plan in place. “Data governance, while broad in scope, boils down to the rules of the road for data collection, storage, and utilization,” explains Donaldson. “You need to have a clear policy on how you collect data, what data you collect, how that data is stored, who has access to it, and what you’re going to do with it now that you have it. You also need to clearly share these policies with your audience (customers/prospects) not only because it is the right thing to do but as it’s now a legal requirement according to GDPR and CCPA—as well as a host of smaller laws making their way through legislatures around the world.”
“Without governance, all your cool data-driven automations and deep-market insights won’t be possible,” Donaldson stresses. “Data governance is the liver and onions before you get a big bowl of micro-targeted ice-cream. It is the foundation from which everything else that you want to do with your data is built.”
When it comes time to establish an effective data standardization and governance program, your executive leadership plays a crucial role. Unfortunately, as Donaldson called out, this type of leadership is lacking among many companies today. Consider the reaction among companies to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an EU law on data protection and Privacy for all individual citizens of the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). Six months after the law was enacted, 47.9% of affected companies still had no formal process in place to become GDPR-compliant. And they’re not alone:
It’s time to take action. “Without governance, marketing will be consumed by the manual and repetitive creation of reports that offer two-dimensional static insights,” Donaldson notes. “Without this crucial first step, discovering and tracking those high-value insights on a consistent basis will be nearly impossible. What you’re left with is all data, no story (or worse, the wrong story).
