‘Marketers need data to do a better job of personalizing the communications that their prospects and customers receive from brands.’

If we all profess to agree with this first statement about data and marketing, then you’d think that all marketers are on board with building out a strategy and then a gameplan to build said unified marketing data source for our respective businesses.

Yet, according to this recent Ascend2 study, more than half of marketers surveyed don’t have a strategy yet and 23% don’t even plan to have a strategy.

Are these responses surprising to you? While this is a snapshot of the current state, I’m left to imagine what types of obstacles exist that would either prohibit a marketing organization from developing a unified marketing data strategy or convince themselves that it’s not even necessary.

For those with no strategy and no plans

If I give the survey responder the benefit of the doubt, perhaps their industry or their business doesn’t feel any pain (ie. business ain’t broke) so the thought of investing a bunch of money in the midst of a pandemic-driven economic downturn could yield that response.

For those without a strategy but are planning to have one

This scenario sounds like a case of head nods about the need to have a 360º view of the customer to deliver more relevant and personalized experiences, but … there are so many other things that have higher priority right now.

For those with a strategy already

Good for you! What follows has to be the work of execution on the strategy and there’s no easy button for that. We’ve seen stories of brands that are using this downturn to focus resources on knocking out some of those to-do lists so. Hopefully, more marketers are making progress in this arena.

What’s the upside of it all?

Well, according to a Forrester study commissioned in July 2020 by Snowflake, the ROI on investments in an operational centralized data repository was expected to be on the order of 612%. In the case of these clients, they invested about $1M each and were expected to yield benefits valued at $21.45M over 3 years. Obviously, not everyone has that kind of cash or cash flow to support that level of investment, but any marketer can benefit from weighing the types of benefits that were noted in the study.

Accelerated time to market and increased profit (music to any sales team), better decision making due to faster data access (sounds like scalable personalization to me), streamlined data operations and savings in infrastructure and database management — I simply can’t imagine anyone being against any of those benefits.

So looking back on the spectrum the ‘No’-’Maybe’-Yes’ centralized marketing data strategy spectrum, where are you? What would it take to move the conversation forward in your company? Who do you think would/could/should stake this flag and champion the upside at your company?