Making Data-Driven Marketing Work - The CMO...

Making Data-Driven Marketing WorkHow CMOs overcome the challenges of data and transform your marketing

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ContentsIntroduction: the opportunities and obstacles of data-driven marketing .................. 3

Meet the experts ................................................................................. 4

Defining ‘data-driven marketing’ .......................................................... 5

In an age of constant evolution, data matters ...................................... 6

Tackling data-driven challenges ......................................................... 8

The virtues of a data-driven marketing organization .......................... 10

What data-driven leaders are looking forward to ................................15

Tips for getting started ......................................................................16

Conclusion: an imperative to evolve .......................................................................18

Further reading ..................................................................................19

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Data-driven marketing: the opportunities and the obstacles

Marketers have relied on data for decades. But it’s only in the last 10 years that data has started to really transform the marketing operation itself. From testing and anonymous personalization to real-time reporting and optimization, modern marketing is transforming into a data-driven machine.

But the road to data-driven success is paved with difficult choices and new lessons about everything from data management to hiring the right talent.

The CMO Club, in partnership with LiveRamp conducted a survey and interviewed some of the CMOs and marketing leaders overcoming these challenges to make their marketing more data-driven.

The result of this research is a series of practical insights into data-driven marketing. We’ve collected those insights here for marketers like you.

Data-driven marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all discipline. But the lessons and advice shared here will help you tackle early obstacles, avoid common problems and harness the power of an intelligent, effective data-driven marketing operation.

Let’s dive in.

CMO Solution Guide: Making data-driven marketing work Data-driven marketing: The opportunities and the obstacles

This is about transformation All of our experts are on different stages of their data-driven journey. But they all share a determination to transform their own marketing departments around data.

As you read the perspectives of your fellow CMOs, one theme leaps out: being data-driven is really all about listening – to your customers, your competitors and your market.

After all the tech talk, being data-driven is simply about valuing your customers enough to listen harder and harder every day. Read on and see how other CMOs are doing exactly this.

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Meet the experts

CMO Solution Guide: Making data-driven marketing work

Colin Hall Chief Marketing Officer and GM International Business, Allen-Edmonds Shoe Corporation

Colin has been CMO of Allen Edmonds Corporation since 2008 and was hired to help the company’s new CEO turn around the iconic American company. Together, they righted the ship during the Great Recession more than doubling revenue and achieving record sales in 2011, 2012 and 2013. Their success was driven by new strategies, product offerings, new store growth, an aggressive e‐commerce plan, brand development, marketing, PR and quality assurance. In Q3 2013, third party research revealed the “highest Net Promoter Scores ever seen” by the research group.

Kat Johnson, marketing & segmentation manager of Allen Edmonds since 2012, was hired to drive marketing into a more personalized and targeted approach. She launched Allen Edmonds’ first marketing database in 2013 which allowed the company to test and optimize marketing to the Allen Edmonds lists. This enabled them to send seven catalogs and a handful of targeted direct mail campaigns in 2015 and circulation of these catalogs has also grown leaps and bounds after testing and measuring ROI. The implementation of automated email marketing initiatives has allowed for the success of email marketing based on purchase history and Kat has plans to continue to grow this significantly in 2016.

Currently vice president of consumer marketing at MetLife, Mr. Boorjian was working at Caesars Entertainment Corporation, the world’s most diversified casino entertainment company, at the time of this interview. He was responsible for influencing customer behavior resulting in increased revenue and profitability.

Prior to joining Caesars, Jeffrey held positions at multiple advertising and branding firms leading projects across diverse industries including hospitality, consumer goods, automotive and healthcare. Jeffrey earned his master’s degree in business administration from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and his Bachelor’s degree from Boston College.

Julie has more than 20 years of experience in consumer marketing and sales. Julie honed her brand management and product marketing experience at Johnson & Johnson, Allergan, Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo. Her specialties include strategic planning, brand turnarounds, and innovation pipeline development.

Before joining Nuvesse Skin Therapies, Julie helped double the size of Torani as vice president of marketing. Her varied portfolio showcases her success in driving company revenues and EBIT across retail, ecommerce and international channels for an array of leading brands.

Kat Johnson Segmentation Specialist, Allen-Edmonds Shoe Corporation

Brian Hovis Senior Vice President, Digital Marketing for North America Bank and Mortgage, Citigroup

Brian is responsible for leading all digital marketing channels including acquisition and onsite strategy and optimization for Citi’s US Bank and Mortgage businesses.

Hovis is a proven marketing leader driving scaled, integrated national campaigns with a track record for consistently driving improved revenue growth, ROI and innovation. He was previously vice president, marketing for Experian’s consumer business and managed digital marketing for Intuit and Sony Electronics, with active media industry leadership.

Julie Garlikov Vice President of Marketing and Retail Sales, Nuvesse Skin Therapies

Jeffrey Boorjian Former Regional Vice President of Marketing, Eastern Division, Caesars Entertainment Corporation

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Defining data-driven marketing

It’s clear that companies with different missions will have different approaches to defining what ‘data-driven’ means.

But all the leaders we talked to tied the value of data to the organization’s ability to deliver better customer experiences.

Here’s our definition of data-driven marketing for the purposes of this eBook.

Data-driven marketing is the discipline of using data to deliver better customer experiences, optimize budgets and gain deeper insights for decision-making.

CMO Solution Guide: Making data-driven marketing work Defining data-driven marketing

It depends on the creation of a strong data foundation, connecting data to marketing platforms, taking an audience-centric approach to campaigns, embracing automation, and iterating to optimize and achieve greater results.

The best marketing has always been data-driven. But today, marketers have access to far more data, from many more sources than ever before. And that’s created a new world of opportunities… and challenges.

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CMO Solution Guide: Making data-driven marketing work In an age of constant evolution, data matters

In an age of constant evolution, data matters

Today, it isn’t just marketing that’s evolving. Consumers are consuming in all sorts of new ways. And whole industries are reinventing themselves.

So before we dive into the practice of data-driven marketing, let’s take a quick look at the evolving context of modern marketing.

The evolution of audiencesNew media, new channels and new ad tech have changed the way audiences interact with, consume and share marketing content. But change is a double-edged sword.

More marketing channels mean more siloed data to try to make sense out of. And a more fragmented customer experience.

Data-driven marketers are addressing these issues today.

And, as exciting as new social channels are, we can’t afford to ignore the fact that audiences are leveraging their own tools to avoid marketing. Yesterday’s DVR is quickly evolving into today’s AdBlocker.

“They’re engaging in different ways – but they’re also disengaging in different ways. And that’s a challenge,” warns Jeffrey Boorjian.

Twenty years ago, it might have been enough to run a TV spot and hope your impressions were really meaningful. Today, marketers can’t afford to simply count impressions – they need to measure real impact.

You’ve also got to use data to torture-test the results you’re getting to make sure they’re the ones your business needs.

The evolution of businessesJust as audiences are changing, business is changing too, largely as they digitize their processes.

eCommerce is the most obvious example of this. Allen Edmonds Shoe Corporation had focused predominantly on its wholesale business since its founding in 1922. In 2008, in the depths of a global recession, the company decided to launch a data-driven ecommerce business.

They’re engaging in different ways

– but they’re also disengaging in different ways. And that’s a challenge

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It was a completely transformative program. Since the move, CMO Colin Hall and just a few newly hired Ecommerce co-workers have grown the company’s website into a lucrative revenue channel, capable of matching its existing wholesale channel, in just a few short years.

“It’s amazing how fast we’ve transformed this company, using data to deliver superior results,” says Hall. It shows that as businesses digitize and evolve, marketing’s role becomes increasingly crucial to to succeed and differentiate the brand/customer experience.

The evolution of the CMOAmidst all the change, it’s only natural that the CMO’s skills should evolve too. For starters, adopting and inspiring a data-driven culture involves a whole new bag of tricks.

Add to this the operational and technical implications of new best practices like marketing automation, segmentation, testing, programmatic buying and attribution modelling and it’s clear that CMOs have been learning a whole lot on their feet – and data skills are the foundation of all these new strategies and tactics.

But Julie Garlikov, VP of Marketing at Nuvesse Skin Therapies, points out that data is just the starting point: “Without that problem solving, analytical and strategic thinking, all the data in the world doesn’t do you any good.”


It’s amazing how fast we’ve

transformed this company, using data to deliver superior results.

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Tackling data-driven challenges

While most CMOs are comfortable with their ability to collect and protect their data, our survey and interviews showed us that they’re struggling with data management challenges like integration, data quality and creating a single view of the customer.

We wanted to find out what advice they had for other leaders trying to overcome the challenges of data management and data-driven marketing.

The “too much data” problemA common early challenge for data-driven marketers lies in knowing the difference between what data’s worth using and what isn’t. So if you’re starting with the data and then trying to work backwards to find out how the dials on your business move, you’re likely to get overwhelmed by an avalanche of available data.

“If you can understand the one or two key purchase drivers or how the path to purchase works and can focus on that data, it’s more helpful than just mining all the data that might be available,” suggests Julie Garlikov, “Just because you can pull the data doesn’t mean it’s useful.”

The data fragmentation problemThe challenge that every data-driven CMO is hitting right now is the extreme fragmentation of data across channels. In a recent Informatica/D&B study, 51% of marketing organizations are now using more than 20 marketing technologies – up 42% from just 3 years ago.

As each technology, channel and platform creates and consumes its own data, the symptoms of fragmentation are everywhere, including:

• Wasted budgets on inefficient ad spend

• Fragmented customer experiences across touch points

• Inaccurate attribution models

• Reports that don’t agree

• Time wasted in ‘data wrangling’

Until data silos can be connected, the data fragmentation problem may well be the number one challenge facing every CMO.

Bridging the online-offline divideIn online channels, marketers can launch incredibly targeted offers, test them, measure them and even tweak them on the fly. But for all the complex attribution models and personalization strategies available to the digital marketer, it’s important not to

CMO Solution Guide: Making data-driven marketing work Tackling data-driven challenges

of commerce sales still happen offline, in stores.

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forget that many interactions still happen offline.

In retail, for instance, 93% of commerce sales still happen offline, in stores.

So the challenge for today’s marketers is really about understanding the relationship between online and offline channels. In fact, a better understanding of the relationship between the two is actually important to digital’s success in a couple of ways.

“The biggest thing is to understand digital’s contribution to in-store purchases. I mean if we know that number, it would help us put more money into digital,” explains Kat Johnson of Allen Edmonds.

But an equally important reason to bridge the gap between online and offline activities is that offline

data (like CRM and transaction data) actually maximizes the impact of online tactics (with techniques such as look-alike modeling, CRM retargeting and ad suppression).

(LiveRamp has written about how to bridge the online-offline divide in more detail in an ebook called ‘Half-blind attribution modelling’.)

Picking the right tools and vendors*As anyone who’s seen the Chiefmartec.com Marketing Technology Landscape will testify, there’s a lot of tech available to marketers. So it’s essential that marketing leaders be careful about how they choose their technology and manage vendors.

All of the CMOs interviewed cited the difficulty of evaluating all the different vendors in a market where they all seem to overlap. It’s undoubtedly

a challenge, but technological decisions are still essential to the modern marketing leader’s role. So Brian Hovis, SVP of digital marketing at Citigroup, recommends a more considered approach:

“My takeaway from building these capabilities is really that less is more. Brands have to be conscious of staying focused and having a short list of technology partners that each play a role, but without a lot of duplications.”


Linking your data for a complete customer viewWhen CMO Colin Hall arrived at Allen Edmonds he had a very long list of things to fix including having 5 separate databases that didn’t talk to one another. This meant Hall had no single view of the customer.

So the key to data-driven success isn’t just more shiny tools and tactics. It’s actually about making what you already have work together in a more cohesive way.

“If I could go back two years, I’d have said that we should’ve gotten our databases together three years prior to that!” Hall admits.

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The virtues of a data-driven marketing organization

Data-driven marketing isn’t just a tactic. Done right, it’s a discipline that has a cultural and strategic impact on the way organizations approach marketing. So let’s take a look at some of the best practices, good habits and cultural traits of a modern, data-driven marketing organization.

Always be testingTesting may be best practice for a lot of marketers. But for data-driven leaders it’s more than just a part of the process. It’s a culture that starts from the top and permeates through the organization, allowing teams to be curious, fearlessly try new tactics and learn from old ones.

“One of the things that we’re very much into is always testing, testing, testing. We have a culture here that allows for continual learning,” says Colin Hall of Allen Edmonds.

Culture starts from the top. Hall says he is lucky to work with a great CEO who has a saying, “It’s okay to make mistakes, let’s just try to make some new mistakes.” This attitude allows for an openness to learning and Hall encourages the brand’s media partners to share ideas with him. In one case, this meant testing a certain demand side platform that eventually went on to become one of the brand’s key strategies for customer acquisition.

From a cultural perspective, this means rewarding people for trying new tactics when they work. And making sure you value the learning from the tactics that don’t work. In a results-driven culture, this can often feel counter-intuitive.

A testing platform that makes it easy to run A/B and multivariate tests – ideally across channels – is an essential part of any data-driven marketing infrastructure.

CMO Solution Guide: Making data-driven marketing work The virtues of a data-driven marketing organization

One of the things that we’re very

much into is always testing, testing, testing. We have a culture here that allows for continual learning.

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Get proactive about segmentationIt wasn’t long ago that basic assumptions about segments didn’t change for years. Now they can change mid-campaign. Because today’s marketing leaders aren’t just using data to learn more about their existing segments, they’re actively testing fundamental assumptions and using data to discover new segments.

“I think we’ve gotten a lot smarter to realize that the audience for our product isn’t ‘everyone’,” explains Jeffrey Boorjian,

“We’re narrowing down the target that we’re going after.”

Zooming in to a more specific segment is essential. And it’s

especially important when you’re dealing with a media landscape where the lines between signal and noise are starting to blur.

As Julie Garlikov of Nuvesse found at her previous brand, all that glitters isn’t gold. “I was getting engagement from lots of people in certain media who were a lot younger, but they weren’t the ones buying so it was very misleading. Sometimes the people chatting about you aren’t the people who buy your products. You have to be really careful about that.”

Fortunately, marketing leaders have never been better equipped to test their segmentation hypotheses and pivot if they’re not performing.

Testing as strategic investing Testing isn’t just a luxury afforded to only the richest marketers with plenty of time and money to waste on bad ideas. It’s actually an essential strategy if you’re trying to make the most of a limited budget.

Julie Garlikov of Nuvesse made the strategic bet to invest close to 20% of her start up’s annual marketing budget on a four- month eCommerce test before

their launch. “You can do a lot with data before you launch,” she explains, “I tested a different brand name, slightly different positioning, pricing, products, different kinds of advertising and blogger programs. What’s interesting is that a lot of my hypotheses were just incorrect. So it was a lot better to learn them in the test market than to learn them in the launch.”

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For data-driven marketers, personalization is the holy grail. So it’s interesting to note that having made some headway down the route to personalization, Allen Edmonds doesn’t treat it like a mere tactic. Instead, it’s an overarching strategy that aims to deliver better customer experiences, across the customer’s lifecycle.

“Our goal is to develop digital strategies that can mimic the in-store experience. In stores, our Master Fitters can consultatively sell a customer by listening to their unique needs and then helping them select an appropriate style, color and size. Doing this digitally is not easy but it is the goal.”

And as CMO Colin Hall describes it, it actually involves four simple, yet distinct levels:

1) Understanding what customers have in their portfolio and what they’re lacking and then pushing style offers to their match their needs

2) Understanding size and fit to manage dynamic offers

3) Customizing the product itself

4) Working on post-purchase emails to optimize cross-sell products and categories that complement their original purchase

Deployed across touchpoints, personalization is a natural and viable successor to old-school segmentation.

Allen Edmonds’ four levels of personalization

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If it matters, measure itMeasurement is fundamental to the modern marketer’s role.

So even though the accurate attribution of sales to different online and offline channels can be challenging for a number of reasons, today’s marketing leaders are still under an immense amount of pressure to prove the ROI of everything they’re doing.

Crucially, that doesn’t mean it’s worth ignoring metrics that are early indicators of performance but don’t directly convert to ROI. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve as a business, this might mean measuring how much buzz you’re building or whether or not you’re moving the needle on certain attitudes towards your brand.

The most data-driven CMOs are invariably the ones who identify the metrics that matter and track them religiously. Many marketers are bringing offline purchase data into attribution platforms that look beyond ‘last click’ models and quantify how top- and mid-funnel tactics contribute to sales.

Master the art of managing third-partiesThe rate at which marketing has evolved into a tech and data-driven discipline is breathtakin. So you can’t always hire the data science and technical talent you need to make data-driven marketing work.

Which means the challenge lies in leveraging third-party talent to get the skills you need – without losing control over what matters most.

Our CMOs were split on this one: some felt their analytics were too important to outsource while others relied on partners to scale their analytics efforts.


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For instance, Jeffrey Boorjian from Caesars Entertainment actually sees it as an opportunity, saying,

“It needs to be tightly intergrated with the business, which if done well should be a competitive advantage.”

The good news is that considering marketing’s long history with both media and creative agencies, few business units are better prepared for the art of managing third parties.

Don’t ignore content and creativeIt’s easy to focus on the ‘data’ part of data-driven marketing. But content and creative are still fundamental to marketing success. So the challenge for leaders is around integrating the work being done to make marketing more data-driven, with the work being done to engage customers with great experiences.

“It isn’t just a data play. You can build all the piping and data connections to best-in-class capabilities. But if you aren’t organized around creative delivery then half of the equation is missing,” asserts Brian Hovis of Citigroup.

As Hovis has found, that second half of the equation is all about giving your prospects something to engage with. So while your data-driven strategy may show you what works and what doesn’t, it’s important to treat the content and creative as an active part of the same strategy.

Programmatic marketing platforms can support this in several ways - either by serving different creative to each audience segment, or by using CRM and transaction data to dynamically assemble the right creative for each consumer in real-time.


It isn’t just a data play. You

can build all the piping and data connections to best-in-class capabilities. But if you aren’t organized around creative delivery then half of the equation is missing,

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What data-driven leaders are looking forward to

In spite of the fact that modern marketing is evolving at breakneck speed, it’s clear to all involved that the innovation isn’t going to stop any time soon. So we asked our interviewees to share their thoughts on the trends and capabilities they’re most excited about seeing in the next twelve months.

True marketing integrationIf the last few years have been about the relentless proliferation of new marketing tools, platforms and capabilities, then the next five years are going to have to be about making all of them work together seamlessly.

For Brian Hovis of Citigroup, marketing’s next frontier is true integration: “The thing I’m most excited about is real integration, fluidity, and to some degree automation across all marketing channels. I’m talking offline, online, sponsorships…everything.”

The more marketers adopt new tools and tactics, the more marketing’s technology stack will expand and fragment.

It’s fast becoming clear that what modern marketing really needs is a connectivity layer that can integrate the growing marketing technology stack across online and offline channels.

Real-timeThe move to programmatic channels and automation has been a huge part of marketing’s evolution. So the natural next step should be towards a real-time connection between the data and the technology being used to control and optimize whole campaigns.

At Allen Edmonds, where email is an important channel for revenue growth, the team is working on real-time connections that will have a very real impact on the

brand’s marketing performance. Soon, there database will be tied to emails so that they will be able to alter campaigns on the fly based on what’s working and what isn’t. This goes way beyond simple A/B testing.”

Not only that, but it would also make the team more agile, helping them validate (or for that matter, invalidate) hypotheses a lot faster, leading to better outcomes.

“If we were to say, ‘we want to target someone in a geography who has purchased X amount in the past and doesn’t have something in their portfolio,’ it would take us a long time to get through the database to find out how many of those people are out there,” explains CMO Colin Hall.

“So while we may think it’s a very valuable campaign, at the end of the day there may be only a relatively insignificant amount of

people who fit those parameters and that’s not very worthwhile for us to go after.”

The thing I’m most excited

about is real integration, fluidity and to some degree automation across all marketing channels. I’m talking offline, online, sponsorships…everything.

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Tips for getting started

Your first steps towards a data-driven culture and approach to marketing can be pretty overwhelming. The bad news is that there are a series of tough calls coming your way. The good news is that there’s a lot of great advice to learn from. Here’s some from our interviews.

Start with a business caseWith all the hype and excitement around data and its impact on marketing, it’s tempting to just dive in without thinking your roadmap through. So it’s important to remind yourself that at the end of the day, like any initiative, you need a clearly defined plan to make data-driven marketing work.

Brian Hovis of Citigroup rightly urges caution when it comes to building out the capabilities needed for data-driven marketing:

“Don’t rush into this. Make sure you have a succinct story to tell around the business case, the business outcome, and how you’re going to measure this.”

Our other CMOs agreed: it all starts with a clear business case that the entire team can buy into. Without that, data initiatives can quickly lose their way.

Be where your customers areEach one of the leaders we spoke to prioritized different channels for their business.

Some prioritized search while others were all-in on programmatic advertising. Others are email-centric or focused on social media. But they’re all active

across multiple channels, recognizing the importance of engaging in conversations wherever they occur, and reaching customers wherever they are.

The key is to know where your best prospects are, consider the benefits of every channel available to you, test your performance in each by segment, and measure everything to discover what works for you.


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Look deeper than traditional metricsDepending on what you’re trying to achieve, it might make sense to use customized metrics that go a couple of levels deeper than the most common ROI metrics. One example of this is at Allen Edmonds, where they look beyond ‘Return on Ad Spend’ (ROAS) to calculate margin returns.

“ROAS is one measure but it masks the variable costs. So, we like to look at ROI in terms of contribution margin” explains Hall.

Of course, while customized metrics like margin contributions might give you a clearer view of your actual impact, Hall and team have found that they do lead to a little more work. Because they have to include a number of variable factors, like credit card

fees, sales commissions, product returns, while simultaneously accounting for different advertising costs across channels.

For Hall, it’s still worth the effort. “You hate to see something where you finish a sale and you had a 15 to 1 ROAS. Because it means you left a lot of money on the table. Also, you don’t want to spend so much money you actually have negative margin contributions.”

Start with transactional dataTransactional sales data is critical for any attribution model. On a macro level it helps you uncover buying patterns and insights into how and when different products are sold. More importantly, it can drastically improve online activities like segmentation and attribution when linked to your online customer data in a privacy-safe way.

“Based on my experience, the biggest piece I learned was that transactional data was the right place for us to start. Because as we integrated the email program and started a post-purchase series, transaction data told us a lot,” explains Kat Johnson, segmentation specialist at Allen Edmonds.

The challenge with transactional data is that it isn’t usually ready for use in marketing tools and tactics. So Johnson recommends teaming up with IT to cleanse and organize your databases so they’re usable in the context of marketing.


...the biggest piece I learned

was that transactional data was the right place for us to start...

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Conclusion :an imperative to evolve

It isn’t a stretch to imagine that in a few years we won’t be using the term ‘data-driven’ marketing. We’ll just call it marketing.But before we reach that point, brands still have to overcome a host of organizational and data management challenges to make sure they’re comfortable in marketing’s new skin.

So it’s worth remembering that today’s marketing leaders are still solving the same business challenges they were tasked with solving ten years ago. They’re still trying to win new customers, delight current customers, seamlessly connect their channel efforts, and prove marketing’s worth.

It’s just that today there is more data and technology

than ever before to make all these things possible.

We hope the insights, best practices and warnings we’ve shared in this eBook both help and inspire you to transform your marketing operation.


About us

LiveRamp is the leader in data connectivity, helping the world’s largest brands use their data to improve customer interactions on any channel and device. We help marketers eliminate data silos and unlock greater value from the tools they use every day. By connecting disparate marketing platforms at the data layer, we enable brands to use a new generation of data-driven marketing strategies for ROI measurement, targeting, one

-to-one marketing, and more.

CMO Solution Guide: Making data-driven marketing work

The CMO Club is the world’s most engaged and inspired community of senior marketing executives who help each other solve their biggest challenges within a candid, trusted, and sharing environment.

Collaboration fueled by inspiring events and within the members-only Digital Solutions Clubhouse raises the standard for what is required to be a successful chief marketing officer. With more than 800 members and a no-vendor selling policy, The CMO Club is the go-to center for today’s senior marketer for peer-based personal and career success support. For more details on membership or becoming a thought leadership partner, please visit thecmoclub.com.

http://thecmoclub.com/

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