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It All Starts and Ends with Data: How Marketers Can Navigate the Economic Downturn

11/11/2022
Adtech
London, UK
85
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Adverity's Harriet Durnford-Smith responds to the latest IPA Bellwether report

Marketing budgets are increasing at their slowest rate since the start of 2021, when pandemic-induced turbulence was the primary cause for uncertainty. Now marketers are contending with a gloomy economic forecast due to the cost of living crisis and consumers’ caution over how they spend their own budgets. In April 2022, seven in ten CMOs already believed money was their most stretched resource, but now marketing investment must go even further to sustain and boost performance. 

Fast, informed, and impactful decisions are necessary for marketers to ensure the right message reaches the right audience at the right moment. Gut instinct alone won’t cut it. They need the ability to combine disparate datasets from not only marketing, but also finance, logistics, and many other sources to build a single source of truth. With this, marketers can navigate uncertainty while improving creativity, maximising spend, and proving the value of marketing decisions for achieving business performance goals.


CMOs understand the advantages of data, but struggle to unlock them

The majority (85%) of CMOs consider data-driven decisions to be vital for maintaining their competitive edge, but more than two-thirds also claim the volume of data they can access is increasingly overwhelming. One ongoing change contributing to this claim is the diversification of marketing channels and platforms, which 33% of CMOs believe is the biggest external factor now impacting marketing. 

Marketers require solutions that can turn this deluge of data into valuable, advantageous insights. They need to know which dials to turn to amplify their marketing creative and media plans, as well as deliver against business needs. 


The key is to have all data in one place 

Data integration is the first critical step for creating a single source of truth. By gathering, integrating, and then analysing data from various sources, marketers can finally have a pa comprehensive and up-to-date view of their marketing performance. This enables them to understand how outside factors influence performance, and how they can pivot strategically if required. 

Almost half of marketers who have self-serve access to real-time reporting, however, point to manual data integration as a core challenge, often leading to human error and compromising data accuracy. Building a single source of truth depends on automating the integration, standardisation, and governance of data at scale. This eliminates inaccuracies and ensures marketers can tap quality data to inform real-time decisions. 

Unified data also unlocks proactive analytics capabilities, so if the public is spending less, marketers can forecast what consumer priorities will be. Marketing and logistics departments, for example, can collaborate to identify which products are in demand. With a holistic view of this data, marketing strategies can be adjusted in line with consumer needs. 

Additionally, through connecting marketing and finance teams, unified data can allow marketers to identify what elements of their campaigns generate the best return, feeding into the ability to both measure and communicate marketing impact on business performance.

Despite the downward pressure on budgets, marketers have an opportunity to refine their data-driven approaches, heighten the impact of their creativity, and get ahead of the competition, helping them navigate current circumstances and emerge from them on the front foot. 

Credits
Work from Adverity
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