Monday, March 22, 2010

Marketers Facing Information overload

Information and data are very important to marketers. Marketing is based on monitoring markets, in order to identify trends and opportunities, and then to measure the return of the different campaigns. Hence, information systems have provided them with tons of data. Especially, those companies who own CRM programs are most of the time overwhelmed with data.

A new study has bolded this fact.
Although marketers collect large amounts of data, they struggle to apply that information to their campaigns, according to a study of global marketers by Unica, an analytics and integrated marketing firm.
“The State of Marketing 2010” survey found that 70% of marketers say the data issue is “very important,” while 24% said it is “somewhat important.” Unica and independent research company Salloway & Associates surveyed 200 online and direct marketers for the report.
“This proliferation of channels is creating a lot data, but marketers don't always know what to do with this data,” said Jay Henderson, director of product marketing at Unica. “They have plenty of data and not enough insights, and they struggle to turn them into action.”
Indeed, a lot of CRM programs provide large amount of data, but it requires know how, expertise and people to analyze and then to get information that you could base your future campaigns onto.

I believe this is the reason why it is important, while owning large amount of data, to actually focus on small projects, and very simple issues to leverage the potential of it. But that studies shows that owning lots of data don’t necessarily mean you’ll have a competitive advantage. What really matters is being able to leverage it for efficient marketing campaigns.