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How agile marketing teams weaponise data to outperform competitors, boost profits
Marketers have long been seduced by the allure of their own creative. However, a turbulent economic climate means consumer behaviour is pivoting in unpredictable ways - and brands who enable agility while responding to real-time feedback loops will come out winning. Seja Al Zaidi speaks to three industry experts to uncover the impacts agile marketing culture & data-led capabilities can have on a brand's profitability.
In order to remain on top in 2022, marketers may need to neglect their commitment to optimise brand over profit. While most teams elevate the significance of creative, alternate perspectives suggest the cultivation of a data-led, customer-centric strategy underpinned by cultural agility can produce notably better financial outcomes for a brand.
The abstract value of storytelling and creative can sometimes backfire on marketers – after all, a mitigated ability to discern tangible ROI makes a billboard less compelling than an investment into data that directly informs customer behaviour.
Earlier this month, marketing measurement and optimisation company Analytic Partners, who count Microsoft, TikTok, Amazon and Google as partners, revealed product enhancements to enable marketers to forecast return on investment. The purpose of these enhancements were to leave ‘no stone unturned’ for marketers – indicating data offerings like brand health metrics, richer algorithms and metadata would enable marketers to continue producing productive outcomes even amidst budget cuts – and as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, those budget cuts tend to eviscerate marketing departments first.
Anthony Shakinovsky, head of performance at Finder, is privy to a surplus of data on consumer behaviour at Finder, across a litany of financial categories. Finder’s data enables a visible assessment of how consumers’ behaviour evolves based on the macroeconomic environment – which, at present, is causing widespread strain for many consumers. But, as Shakinovsky explains, the brands who are nimbly adapting to shifting consumer behaviours and needs are witnessing profound impacts on their bottom line.
Shakinovsky urges leaders to ensure they cultivate two key enablers for marketers: access to the right data, and cultural agility, both of which he believes allow marketers to optimise their marketing channels to achieve meaningful business metrics, as opposed to vanity metrics.
Anthony Shakinovsky, Head of Performance AU at Finder.
Fundamentally, he believes the brands who respond to real-time feedback loops with their vehement data capabilities will undoubtedly come out on top and produce excellent financial outcomes for the business in the digital age.
“The brands that enable marketing teams with the right data advantages will have a compelling competitive advantage outperforming their peers,” Shakinovsky says.
“Marketing can be a very powerful lever to drive financial results. The question all brands need to be asking, is ‘how can we enable marketing?’ versus simply expecting marketing to deliver results. The capabilities marketers are given and the environment they operate in are a huge determinant of their success and impact.”
“If you give the same person a much richer set of conditions, then they’re going to be able to perform way better. So the key question is not just expecting marketers to perform. The key question is how can organisations give marketing the conditions that enable them to perform – that’s going to look different for every organisation,” Shakinovsky says.
“The ones that do that, in my view, will be significantly ahead of the others, because they’re going to be more connected with customers, they’re going to give customers better experiences, they’re going to be better at retention, they can be better at media buying, they’re better at onboarding – so they’re going to have much healthier financial outcomes and much better customer experiences than the ones that don’t.”
In enabling agility, leaders need to firmly challenge the status quo set by competitors
Shakinovsky is firm in his belief marketers are the products of their environment – meaning the C-suite could be to blame if they’re hellbent on maintaining a bloated culture that devalues agility.
“Marketers are smart. They can only optimise to what they can measure,” he says, emphasising the onus on leadership to cultivate an agile culture where “marketers are armed with metrics around customer behaviour and profitability, and the right KPI’s”.
Shakinovsky describes cultural agility as an environment enriched by a level of freedom and flexibility in terms of planning, budgeting, and influence over all customer touch points and user experience, ultimately allowing marketers to take meaningful action off the back of data access.
“Anyone who’s got a stake in the financial outcomes of an organisation should really be working towards helping marketing. And the reason for that is because marketing can be such a powerful contributor to those outcomes,” Shakinovsky says on the profound contribution marketers could have on profit if only they were uniformly enabled with comprehensive real-time data access.
“What brands want is not just customers, they want the right customers who are displaying the right type of behaviour. If marketers have agility, then they have the ability to take the data they have, and to put that into really meaningful action. It’s important for marketers to have agility so that they can invest at times where the behaviour customers are displaying is different to what you would have thought,” Shakinovsky notes, citing recent RBA cash rate increases as an incitement of pivoting consumer behaviours that marketers need to exhaustively track – and fast.
Finder partners with financial institutions to help customers make decisions across various categories – be they credit cards, home loans or insurance policies. Interestingly, Shakinovsky explains the brands they partner with that are highly agile and act fast on opportunities identified through data analysis on customer behaviour see the outcomes reflected in their bolstered, boosted bottom line.
“[Those brands] will be present when customers need them. Just like with refinancing and with savings account searches at the moment; those brands are acquiring more customers.”
“It’s important that marketers have access to the right data around customer profitability, so they can optimise their marketing channels to achieve meaningful business metrics rather than vanity metrics. Marketers can only optimise results to what they can measure. Cheap leads can be the most expensive if they aren’t measured against end business metrics.”
Is cultural agility merely aspirational for marketers?
Bronwyn Galvin, chief marketing officer at Unloan, a digital home loan platform built by Commbank, is of the opinion that marketing teams have a long way to go when it comes to actually implementing agility.
“Being agile can be aspirational for marketing teams sometimes. A culture of agility can be hard to achieve when our processes as marketers are reliant on input from customers, prospects, internal stakeholders and even regulators in our fields, all that input takes time,” Galvin says.
This may make cultural agility seem like an unreachable, glossy fantasy for marketing teams, who generally aren’t armed with the financial data that allows them to act on contingencies to produce the best results in evolving contexts.
Unloan by Commbank.
Commenting on how brands could tangibly enact agility, Shakinovsky says: “I’m a massive believer that directionally, this is where all brands should be going if they’re not there already. They should be building these capabilities around enabling marketers with the right data on customer profitability and agility,”
“I think there’s a really valid question as to how you do that – and there’s different solutions which are different for every organisation. If you’ve got an organisation that where it’s not their their skill set, for example, to build an online application, perhaps outsourcing to another provider that does have that expertise is the right way to go.
“I would recommend being agnostic as to how you do something. Do what makes sense to your individual circumstances. But, there needs to be a non negotiable commitment to directionally ensuring that you are enabling marketers with the right data on customer profitability and giving them agility to act on it.”
Media buying was pegged as an example of why comprehensive data access and cultural agility are so important: “By remaining close to customer behaviour data, you can gain a competitive advantage by being able to react opportunistically to changes, including customer demand,” Shakinovsky says.
“Sticking to a plan that was created under very different conditions and assumptions means you may miss out on providing customers with choice and not drive the greatest brand impact.”
Galvin has made strides in enabling agility as a CMO – and her team has seen very visible, enhanced financial results as a consequence.
“The purchase journey is really not simple and the data gives us many signals about who our customers are, how they respond to what we offer, when they are receptive. Though it may be a cliché, I personally think that customers vote with their feet. Through understanding what motivates a customer to make a choice – like switching their home loan – we can make meaningful changes and actions which are in the best interest of our customers.”
“It’s my personal opinion that agility is only possible in marketing when the guiding strategy is bulletproof. By having all the key influencers within a business aligned to a strong and meaningful strategy, marketers can have the freedom to move on tactical activities at speed, and the courage to challenge the status quo which is often driven by competitors.”
Frictionless experiences and a culture of trust underpin organisational agility
Sebastian Paulin is the head of growth at Ubank, an online bank that operates as a division of NAB, and has a strong user experience.
Paulin is emphatic that marketing teams need to be endowed with trust to perform at their best – otherwise, brands run the risk of sluggishly inching towards mediocre results that impress nobody.
“Marketing teams thrive in an environment where trust is given freely as opposed to earned progressively. When trust needs to be earned, you end up with incremental ideas with incremental gains. Trust, given freely, gives marketing teams permission to embrace moonshot ideas capable of 10x-ing your customer growth in what inevitably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Paulin.
“Acting on real-time feedback loops requires access to the right data at the right time. In the modern martech stack, that means leveraging a customer data platform (CDP) like Tealium to connect online and offline data for a unified view of the customer. From here, you can use the power of machine learning to create audiences or events that trigger more personalised customer experiences.”
Accessing machine learning.
“Build a culture where experimentation is hard wired into everything you do. The discipline of testing hypotheses and learning from failures as much as wins will go a long way in creating a safe space for your teams to grow,” Paulin adds.
Shakinovsky explains that a frictionless user experience, which maintained uniformity amongst touchpoints and enabled a smooth onboarding process far supersedes the impact of creative for brands.
“Marketers that can see the areas in their acquisition funnels where there is the greatest room to improve conversion, and are enabled with the agility to improve the user experience, have a huge competitive advantage,” Shakinovsky says.
“For example, ensuring that the mobile version of an application journey is as frictionless as possible is generally a huge path to stronger experience and conversion. This may be enabled by ensuring all unnecessary steps and information are removed, customers can save their progress and send it to themselves to complete later, or that the call to action is clear.”
“Brands that have the agility to respond to real time feedback loops are the ones that are going to win,” Shakinovsky asserts.
“As a marketing leader or a CMO, there is just so much to grapple with, particularly over the last couple of years – give customers experiences that add value for them. We see radical differences in conversion on Finder based on user experience.”
So much talk of data, KPI’s, ROI and profitability but no clear example using any of those things to support these very general statements.
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