Why Marketers Need Data and How They Should Use It

In the past, data management rested at the helm of IT departments and data analysts. Marketers depended on IT to store and grant access to data, while data analysts took charge of mining this data and transferring it into actionable insights.

As consumers become increasingly connected and social, though, businesses need to restructure their data strategies to give marketers a much more direct way to access and use social data to personalize their campaigns and reach more customers. In the age of the connected consumer, data must be readily accessible to non-technical types who possess the vision and expertise to use it to acquire and retain customers.

Below are two reasons why marketers who want to stay ahead need to begin leveraging their social data, along with some ways marketers can start taking action on their data today:

1. User anonymity is a thing of the past

Traditionally, it was nearly impossible for businesses to identify their users in actionable ways. However, today’s users are sharing personal information with their social networks, creating volumes of social data that businesses can use to understand and target customers more effectively.

With so many users baring their personal identities to their favorite social networks, marketers need to find ways to use this data to generate returns for their businesses. In the past, websites used traditional login dialogs, which typically include fields such as name, email address, home address, birth date, and gender, to register and retain their users’ information. However, this information was typically unhelpful to businesses seeking to understand their user base in deeper, actionable ways.

How Marketers Should Respond
As users share their personal details across their social network channels, social login offers a way to capture this social data in a streamlined, non-intrusive manner so businesses can use it to personalize marketing messages. Marketers will want to find a social login provider that offers a variety of social network options to choose from, a permission-based dialog for data exchange, and a way to store data so that it can be easily accessed and utilized.

2. Users are increasingly connected and social.

Today’s hyper-connected customers are flooded with marketing messages everywhere they click. Thus, getting their attention means crafting campaigns that reach consumers on a personal level by bringing up their interests, backgrounds, social graphs, and more. This can mean surfacing site content or sending tailored emails based on the interests listed in a user’s social network profile, or showing a socially logged in user which members of his or her social graph performed a desired site action.

Social login initiates and enables the data capture process, but marketers seeking to impact their marketing efforts through social data will need a software solution to store the data in a way that it can be easily accessed and utilized for customized campaigns and user experiences.

How Marketers Should Respond
With more and more users sharing personal, actionable data across their social networks, marketers need to take action on this information by porting it into third-party marketing platforms like email marketing software, CRM systems, advertising servers, and more. To enable this, businesses will want to ensure that their data management system comes equipped with the capability to export data into other marketing platforms for use in marketing campaigns.

A Data Democracy

As social data becomes a more integral part of a business’s online experience and marketing strategy, it’s important that the marketers utilizing this data are able to access and make use of it themselves. This process of democratizing data — making it available and accessible to non-technical types — should help eliminate technical roadblocks to data so marketers can focus on strategizing, measuring, and acting on their ideas.

To learn more about managing and using social data, download our free white paper, Harnessing Big Data to Grow Revenue.