Big data into marketing core driving force

According to IBM, the amount of data produced every day in the world is 2.5 million bytes and multiplied by three times, enough to fill up 531 million DVDs. Of all the information data in the world, 90% is produced in the last two years. Graeme Noseworthy, director of marketing and marketing at IBM's large data processing software group, said: "For a long time, we have focused on the human resource based business, and now we are moving towards a data-driven organizational structure that will give us an unprecedented level of customer-centric reach." ”

Big data explosions require companies to stop relying on intuition to make decisions. Marketers feel pressured to take advantage of new data-driven customer intelligence. No wonder the strong interest in large data has become one of the most sought-after qualities of marketers. Recently, however, corporate Executive Board (CEB), in a survey of nearly 800 marketers of Fortune 1000 companies, has found that most marketers still rely on intuition and few people who actively use large numbers do well. Here are our important findings:

Most people rely too much on intuition.

On average, marketers have only 11% of the decision-dependent data in all customer-related decisions. In fact, when we ask marketers to think carefully about the information they use in their recent decisions, they say more than half of the information comes from experience or intuition about customers. They finally consider data-tracking conversations with managers, co-workers, expert advice, and one-time interactions with customers.

But in today's volatile business environment, relying on past experience to make decisions is becoming increasingly unreliable. As consumer behaviour changes, once-effective assumptions (such as "Older consumers don't use Facebook or send information") are immediately outdated.

Most people are not good at statistics

When we tested marketers ' statistical abilities with five of them, nearly half (44%) had done the wrong four or five questions, and only 6% had done all the tests. So it's not surprising that only 5% of marketers have statistical textbooks.

Some people overuse data

Although most marketers do not make the most of their data, a small percentage (11%) still feel inadequate. These people are concerned about data changes every day, and they depend entirely on data for most decisions. They are "connected" personalities and like external incentives so they love data and any form of feedback, including information from marketing, managers or co-workers, and the data that comes with frequent interactions with others. We call these people "couplings", and they are the ones most CMO are looking for. But this type of marketing staff is often the result of poor performance (their performance rating is lower than the average of other marketing staff). The problem is that they lack the statistical quality or judgment to use data effectively. Whenever they see a new standard, they make adjustments and they often change direction so that they lose the ultimate goal. In the management position, these people's endless exercise activity (fire drills), hinders others to persist the project for a long time, achieves the best result, thus causes the company to bring the huge destruction. To make matters worse, many marketing courses (especially direct marketing, digital marketing and loyalty marketing) have always inadvertently encouraged this behavior, resulting in magnified problems. That's because the information boards often capture basic metrics such as click and open rates, which are less relevant than the more important indicators of customer loyalty and value, but marketers are rewarded for improving the response data model.

Focus on target, filter interference factors

Managers believe that today's top marketers should have three key qualities: the ability to adapt to uncertainty, the ability to ask strategic questions based on data, and the ability to focus on higher-order goals. These qualities help marketers filter out distractions and apply insights or data points only to long-term success. This ability to filter interference becomes more important when marketers are better exposed to raw data and large data is kept growing.

The bad news for marketing leaders is that few people have the ability to filter the distractions (about 10% of marketers are good at it), and this ability is difficult to get through professors. The good news is that an environment with a good coaching team will protect marketers from interfering with interruptions and reminders to avoid the target from departing the route. In order to use data more effectively, the best business leaders continue to restate their business goals (keeping them out of the way) and teach marketers to put the data first, at the core, when making decisions. and exercise the sensitivity of marketers to the common and erroneous interpretation of data. Following these steps will enable even the most distracting data enthusiasts to accomplish the task beyond expectations.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)