“A customer-obsessed enterprise focuses its strategy, its energy, & its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of & engagement with customers & prioritises these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.”*
Quality data is the insight Marketers need to become Customer-Obsessed.
As I spend my time reviewing the performance of our Oracle Marketing Cloud B2B (Eloqua) campaigns, I’m constantly looking at Digital Body Language in combination with the overall campaign performance. I’m looking to understand, at a high level, which parts of the campaign have been most successful and which have driven the best engagement.
Engagement, by our definition, is email opens, email click-through, web page views, form completions and registrations for events. Over time, these activities build a view into Digital Body Language and allow me to gauge a person’s level of interest. This is balanced with our Lead Scoring to help the sales team prioritise their engagement with our prospects.
As a side note, Lead Scoring is also a great way to infer the engagement of customers. You may want to score customer engagement to support up-sell and cross-sell opportunities or to generally understand customer’s engagement across your digital properties.
A beginners approach to understanding data
If you’re a CMO, you’ve probably read as much as you can from organisations like McKinsey & Co., Forrester Research, Gartner, HBR and Oracle. Each of these organisations comes at data from slightly different angles. However, the end goal is the same, to derive the insight you need to support smart campaigns to drive engagement and in turn, revenue.
But where do you start?
You’ll find varying responses to this question, but my suggestion is to start with what you have. Start with the data you have in your CRM and your Marketing Automation platform. If the two aren’t integrated and talking at least every 15 minutes, you’re already behind the eight-ball.
You need to work with the CIO and CFO to understand how the data you already have access to e.g. the CRM and Marketing Automation platform, can be enhanced if connected to additional systems. The first candidate is your ERP data followed by an eStore – if you have one.
The combination of CRM, ERP, eStore and Marketing Automation data will go a long way towards helping you realise your customer-obsession goals. Getting these systems talking to one another is at the top of your priority list. It may be via a data warehouse or it could be through direct integration. Our experience shows that having Oracle Marketing Cloud B2B (Eloqua) integrated into the CRM, generally the source of truth, is the best place to start.
However, each organisation will differ and the connections between various systems and the way they’re connected will differ based on your business requirements and possible system limitations.
How does this data help?
Quite simply, this data – in combination, will help you get a greater understanding of your prospect and customer’s Digital Body Language. Marketers will be able to build segments that show things like:
- Recent high-performing web page views
- Recent purchase activity
- Cases or Service Requests that could be in play
- Is the contact in a current sales cycle i.e. an open active Opportunity
- Have they recently downloaded a specific offer e.g. whitepaper etc
- A contact’s responses to a survey
All of this data and so much more will help marketers build a segment based not simply on profile, but also on behaviour – digital behaviour. This supports the idea of true marketing automation and avoids the mentality of batch-and-blast, the process of taking the entire database and sending everyone the same email. Batch-and-blast is not the behaviour of a Modern Marketing organisation.
Start here
The best place to start is to understand your current data sources and their relationship to one another. Take the approach of “Where is the source of truth?”. For example, the CRM may show customer purchase history, but it’s likely the ERP is the source of truth. Map these systems as a diagram so you can see their relationship to one another.
In this same diagram, be clear about the directional flow of data from one system to the other.
At some point, you will want to get to the micro level of field data. Some fields will update each other, while others may flow in one direction only. Another example, is if the call centre receives an inbound call and one outcome is the updating of a billing address – does that data flow from the CRM back to the ERP/billing system? Each of these points need to be considered and understood.
Modern Marketing Resources
There is a term for what I’ve outlined above, it’s called Master Data Management. Oracle leads the industry in solutions to help you achieve the integration of your various systems The idea of master data management is to create a single source of truth for customer data which all systems connect to i.e. your ERP, CRM, Marketing Automation platform and others. I’ve included some links below to help you understand further.
“Integrating master data can be perceived as an IT-related issue, and, hence, business stakeholders may be reluctant to engage in these initiatives. However, MDM is a cross-functional, technically complex, process-oriented discipline affecting information about customers, products, vendors, locations, and more. MDM requires acceptance and wide organizational support, and the message resonates best when MDM is placed into a business context.”
Oracle Master Data Management is a comprehensive platform that delivers consolidated, consistent and authoritative master data across the enterprise and distributes this master information to all operational and analytical applications.
Its capabilities are designed for mastering data across multiple domains ranging from Customer, Supplier, Site, Account, Asset and Product among many others.
