Your data strategy 10-point plan

Data is big news and making data part of any marketing strategy is a must.

Data strategy is a core enabler to ensure long-term brand health. Marketers may collect data and use it to improve communications with customers, but how do you create a continuous cycle of data strategy innovation in your marketing strategy easily?

Here are 10 tips to get you on the way:

1. You must balance privacy concerns with data access. Create a solution to see more of your consumers’ engagements, while protecting their privacy, so they can have a better sense of the value they’re receiving from you.

Be sure to publish in “plain English” your privacy policy and ensure opt in and opt out options are very clear.

2. Rely on data heavily to create offerings to communicate the right information and services in a contextually relevant way.

3. Use the data to increase relevance and personalisation as a continuous improvement process.

4. Create a data dashboard, with value points attached to the variable data points and touch points with consumers.

5. Open those value points up to your customers, allow them to individually assess the value they are receiving from you, report the feedback into the data dashboard

6. Don’t forget social – create an assessment from your consumers of the social impact value of your offerings. For example, attending an event or branded incentives most taken advantage of. Feedback into your data dashboard.

7. Understand where your data sources are coming from: organic; consumer touch-points; demographics; purchase behaviours; publicly available information.

8. Don’t forget to use ALL data-gathering sources comprehensively. Day-to-day data-gathering sources may include: your website; email programs; apps; mobile search; SEO; web analytics. This allows you to have a better understanding of user behaviour and channel engagement of choice.

9. Continually optimise. If you read the data, you read your consumers and create a continuous optimisation process in your data dashboard and into your communications. In turn, becoming more relevant and creating more sales opportunities.

10. Data strategy is evolving. Hire staff to better reflect the digital economy and pay heed to the critical importance of a data strategy in your business.

Fi Bendall is the managing director of Bendalls Group, a team of highly trained digital specialists, i-media subject matter experts and developers.