What can data do for marketing? Quite a lot — it informs the strategies formulated when it comes to launching campaigns, provides valuable intel on consumer backgrounds, and allows for more informed strategies to respond to market trends. But this is all approaching it from the direction before launch. What can data do after the first advertisement has aired or when a thousand impressions have been made?
That’s where data management comes in. Usually taking the form of software, this system allows for the creation, storage, and retrieval of data (raw or processed) allowing them to be leveraged by the company or brand in all future decisions. While it may seem a little silly to keep tabs on each and every data point your marketing strategy has produced, data management can show you how all of those parts are bigger than their sum once combined.
Here are the three reasons data management can drive marketing efforts even after the strategy has already been implemented:
Creation
For one thing, campaigns aren’t over when the activation event ends. There’s a ton of data — mostly in the form of consumer feedback — that’s generated from the campaign, and while all of this may seem like a pain to sort out manually, data management allows for smooth automation of this process. The data created needs to be pulled into a form that can be understood, and this can be a tedious process if not worked on by software.
This creation process can be as thorough or as general as you can set it to be. Best practice will often recommend integrating your consumer and demographics research into the construction of the feedback that your data management will generate, allowing for a closer alignment between your initial goals and the actual result that you’ve achieved.
Storage
After all the prerequisite data has been collated, it needs to sit in secure storage while it’s being processed (either by the software itself or actual teams that sift through the result). Data management allows for a convenient place to keep all the information generated and can be secured to prevent unauthorized access — a big concern in the age of data breaches.
You also have the option of partnering with another entity of your data management storage, allowing you to still work on the information you’ve gathered while avoiding the clog that can fill up your personal servers if you took all that on your own. Technologies such as the cloud and real-time peer-to-peer sharing make this collaboration much easier, and can already be included in the software itself.
Retrieval
Finally, data management allows for smooth retrieval of the relevant information for future access or use. This is critical once the time comes to generate a report about the performance of the marketing campaign and can be used as a reference for planning future campaigns. Again, this feature can be included in the software itself.
Reporting is the primary purpose of retrieval, but it isn’t the only one. The heavily collaborative aspect of our workplaces (such as teams of direct marketing professionals in London) today will often require that information be stored and easily retrieved in a central location by different teams (sometimes working in unison) in order to facilitate a smooth production process. Data management software can help with this goal, allowing for a faster and more efficient workflow with the current and future campaigns.
