A modern marketers’ survival guide to the data explosion

CMO’s biggest priority in 2019 is getting actionable insights from data. We know this because they’ve told us.

“With the exponential growth of data over the past decade and into the new year, it’s becoming harder daily to turn information into action,” says SurveyMonkey CMO Leela Srinivasan. “While more data has the potential to deliver more meaningful insights, prioritizing an action plan to address it is critical.”

The question, of course, is how.

The big problem for mobile/digital marketers today is way too much data. Exploding channels. And more and more siloed marketing technology tools to “manage” it. As we see every day, everything in technology and data is up and to the right:

• 40K searches/second on Google
• 5.9B mobile subscribers by 2025
• Global datasphere ballooning from 33 zettabytes today to 175 by 2025
  (one ZB is a trillion GBs)
• 70% of TVs shipped now are smart TVs

Apps, web, wearable tech, and IoT are all adding to the datastream, and smart products have their own datastreams as well that are valuable resources for marketers to understand their customers: garage door openers, heating and cooling systems, smart ovens, you name it.

Marketing intelligence: needle, meet haystack

The problem is that marketers can’t find the needle (insights for growth) in the haystack (data).

The solution is a new kind of marketing technology. It’s something that leading marketers at companies like Lyft, AirBnB, Match, Yelp, Disney, Target, Rovio, Wish, and Zillow are using, and it’s becoming a key part of CMOs’ (and CGOs) growth stacks.

There are three key problems that Singular’s marketing intelligence platform solves:

Too much marketing data in too many places?
>> Singular unifies marketing data
Not clear what marketers need to do to achieve optimal growth?
>> Singular generates intelligent insights
Too much manual Excel work for marketers?
>> Singular automates key marketing processes

The result is the ability to achieve massive growth at scale through automation. Now marketers can expand ROI-positive advertising to multiple networks. They can improve conversion rates on offers due to better insights into profitable growth. They have accurate data thanks to automatically normalized and standardized data from all their media sources, and they’ve saved time and resources thanks to fewer manual processes.

“The new marketer is a marketing scientist who observes data, runs experiments, and optimizes for growth based on the results,” says Gadi Eliashiv, CEO of Singular. “This new marketer needs new kinds of tools, and we think a marketing intelligence platform is a key part of the modern growth stack.”

The marketing scientist

The data, channel, and tool explosion has fundamentally changed marketing.

Over the past decade we’ve seen the rise of the marketing technologist, who has one foot in the marketing department and another in engineering. And we’ve seen the data scientist role jump from nothing to being one of the fastest-growing jobs in just a decade.

But today is the age of the marketing scientist.

Most performance and growth marketers are millennials who grew up with computers. They understand data. They speak code. They can interact with smart systems in intelligent ways, and think of marketing as science as well as art.

As a scientist, the only thing I believe in is experimentation. I look at my current system, perturb it through different creative and different levels of spend, and different bids, and new channels, and new partners, and I look what the effect is on the metric I care about.

Alok Gupta, Head of Marketing Science, Lyft

Marketing scientists use tools. They use data. But they are not defined by their tools or their data. Instead, they are defined by their mindset. Marketing scientists operate as scientists.

• They form hypotheses
• They run experiments
• They measure results
• They optimize based on their source of truth: accurate ROI for every marketing activity

This isn’t about setting it and forgetting it: there are always new channels, new creative, new ads, new offers, and new initiatives to test and optimize. And the cycle of experimenting, measuring, optimizing never ends.

How a modern growth stack helps

The primary function of a marketing intelligence platform (AKA “growth stack”) is to provide insights for growth by connecting effort with outcome at granular and aggregate levels … across all your marketing activities. That includes both paid — advertising — and organic.

When marketers achieve this, they achieve a number of incredibly important things.

First: unprecedented visibility at scale

With a MIP, marketers achieve full knowledge of the return on investment for all their marketing efforts at a granular level. That means understanding both the full costs of each marketing activity, whether paid or organic, and the specific results those activities achieved. When marketers have this at a granular level, they have data on their results by overall campaign, by ad sets/groupings, and even by individual pieces of creative, or grouped sets of creative around similar themes.

Second: on-demand prismatic reporting

With a MIP, marketers can slice and dice their data like never before by dimensions they never had access to before — like calculating CAC by creative asset type across all their ad partners. Using a marketing intelligence platform allows brands to connect data that otherwise would never connect: dimensions that might exist just in your internal customer segmentation models.

For example, a prospect might convert into a customer via a campaign targeted at luxury buyers, but actually buy a product focused more on utility. Knowing which customers respond to which messages helps brands communicate in smarter ways to customers in order to maximize profitability.

Third: customer journey insights

With a MIP, marketers have a global perspective on their customers’ journey across devices and platforms. Marketers can see when customers who onboarded via a Google search ad re-engaged via a Facebook ad. And they can see when a customer begins with purchases online and moves to buying in-app. This is critical for business growth metrics such as ROI and true CAC. Absent that data, marketers don’t have accurate insights, and may make incorrect future budget allocation decisions.

Modern marketers: meet your survival guide

Without a global perspective, marketers can only achieve local maximums: optimizations in small subsets of their campaigns. That’s useful as far as it goes — good is better than bad at any level — but it doesn’t achieve holistic gains.

And it doesn’t offer a single view of your customer across channels and media.

One pane of glass that unifies your campaigns, results, and insights is the holy grail of marketing technology, and it’s exactly what Singular has been built to do.

Learn more about Singular’s marketing intelligence platform, or get a demo.