Venturing into the thick forests of marketing and advertising can sometimes be daunting, the forest grows ever more complex, the skills needed to navigate your way more rigorous. The lifeline that leads your way, which shines like the lighthouse beam on a stormy sea; DATA… Data is critical to your survival and your ability to thrive in this harsh environment. Your data strategy is the shelter and warmth that will provide protection and cover during your quest. Data relating to content is your nourishment, the food and water that feeds your journey. Your analytics data is your compass and your navigation mechanism, allowing you to know you are on track and enabling you to alter your course if you are being led astray. You need tools and equipment for your journey and the technology you take with you can make all the difference – without a good knife where would we be… And of course your magic key of data activation, it unlocks the value in your kit and lets you develop insight that will lead you to your destination. So to help you weary travellers along your quest, to arm you with the best advantage and invigorate you with knowledge, ADMA are happy to share with you the DATA SURVIVAL GUIDE; everything you need to succeed. Produced in conjunction with the valiant speakers coming to you at ADMA Data Day in Sydney on the 27th April and Melbourne on the 29th April where more secrets will be revealed…

Angus Stevens Digital Content & Product Director Nova Entertainment

Mike Sherman Marketing, Insights, CRM & Big Data Expert Hong Kong Telecom

Graham Cook Group Head of Digital Operations Thomas Cook

Luke Rattigan COO & Executive Director Sportsbet

Dr Peter Brawn Founder Gateway

Renee Welsh Co-Founder & CEO Booking Boss

Rodd Martin CEO Smart Video Australia

Simon Reynolds VP Marketing Airtasker

Tim Hill Co-founder Social Status & SocialROI.org

Sam Kline Senior Manager, Products & Marketing (AU) ANZ

“Having access to relevant and understandable data is like having a watertight shelter, it gives you the comfort to make the

right decisions.”

Graham Cook - Thomas Cook

Graham Cook Group Head of Digital Operations Thomas Cook

The more relevant the data, the more informed you are, and the more reassured you are, that you’re making the right decisions. For example, a travel company may base decisions around what destination to market based on Google search metrics. Planning your data strategy is like planning your expedition, you need to prioritise what you want to capture with clear reasons why, make sure it is possible to capture the data and present it in a clear and understandable format. It is also highly advantageous to empower someone in your expedition team (eg an analyst) to analyse the data and draw conclusions or propose hypotheses from which actions can be taken. Team work on your expedition is vital, in order to survive be transparent with the data you capture, (share it with everyone in your team and preferably the natives), everyone will benefit from this, then empower people to propose insight and hypotheses. But a word of warning - be clear on who makes the decisions and allocates resources to the actions – you do need an expedition leader!!

“In an e-commerce business, having a data strategy is key to building sustainable competitive

advantage.”

Luke Rattigan - Sportsbet

Luke Rattigan COO & Executive Director Sportsbet

When you and your team are heading on a quest it is important to have a single view of your goal, so it is with your customer. Build a single view of your customer, don’t just rely on a single data set for customer truth. Blend multiple data sets together to get the deepest understanding of your customers. Your choice of equipment is critical; you need the right data tech which is probably in the cloud, but before you invest too much, use the test and learn approach to experiment with various technologies. Just as expeditions of old needed Royal backing, executive sponsorship of your data strategy is key, as well as providing the right environment and culture for your team. Integration within your team is optimal, devolve analysts and data scientists throughout the organisation and keep them close to business stakeholders. Provide access to your data to as wide an audience as possible and bring analysts and data scientists together regularly to share learnings and experiences.

“Data: big, medium or small, is just a tool, nothing less, nothing more.”

Mike Sherman - HK Telecom

Mike Sherman Marketing, Insights, CRM & Big Data Strategist Hong Kong Telecom

Data strategy shows us where we are headed and what is the benefit we will deliver to consumers and to our company. Lacking a clear strategy we are out in the cold, you can end up with masses of data, powerful tools and a skilled team but unable to produce valued output for your customers or your company. When considering the warmth and comfort of data strategy think; what is the benefit you are creating for your current and potential customers? You need to start with why the output will be valued. Too much usage of big data ends up annoying or harassing customers, not satisfying them. The biggest challenge in big data is not collecting, storing, analysing or using the data nor in finding the people who can do these tasks well. The abilities and skills don't exist in a single product or person, but they do exist. The biggest challenge is in educating the end internal user in how to leverage these abilities to their benefit. Too many end users are still largely delivering mass marketing or quasi-mass marketing campaigns, or those largely driven by demographics or identical prior usage.

“Data is best used when looking to frame / reset the subjective opinions that many within the business might have, around

content that's being delivered.”

Angus Stevens – Nova Entertainment

Angus Stevens Digital Content & Product Director Nova Entertainment

Food and nourishment are critical to survival, so it is with data and content. If you look at the traditional 'food pyramid' and what makes a healthy diet - there's sugars on the top - through to grains etc. Just as you need a variety of food groups you need a variety of data sources and metrics when it comes to content to make sure you’re getting the full picture. With data and content you need to consider what is the most important outcome you're after. Is it numbers to the site, sales conversions, a deep engagement with the content across social etc.? Once you've got clarity over the single most important factor - the one that defines what your success looks like, then you can shape your content strategy to serve that single purpose - thereby creating 'tasty' content that'll nurture both your needs and that of your brand / client / consumers / audience. In particular the trick with data is making sure you accurately read what it is telling you - rather than just skim the surface making reactive decisions, you need to look at the broader picture and glean from it the principals behind why your audience is responding in a particular manner. Effective use of data allows you to break down trends to look at the specific activity of your audience - the subsets within it, and from that information it allows you to understand how to consistently deliver what your audience is after. The timing of content is just like your own diet - don't serve up fried eggs at dinner time - i.e. the content that people want at the end of the day in their Facebook feed is different to what that want as they wait at the station for the morning train.

“Keywords are the breadcrumbs that lead your prospects to water.”

Renee Welsh – Booking Boss

Renee Welsh Co-Founder & CEO Booking Boss

Creating relevant content pieces that address all stages in the buyer journey is vital for any business that wants to succeed in the digital age. However, there’s a huge difference between producing content regularly and producing content that actually drives results and delivers ROI. Content topics need to be based on data insights from keyword research, engagement metrics, as well as customer insights gathered through behavioural data and additional research. This kind of content creation process requires a strategic approach and thorough planning in order to be genuinely successful. Your keyword research is integral here. Understanding user search data around your long and short tail keywords, as well as the brand phrases, product or service phrases, and intent words that buyers use to find your category are key to understanding how you should blog. There are 3 key elements of a content marketing strategy (not to be confused with content strategy): 1. SMART goals 2. Persona profiling 3. Team Alignment

See Renee’s blog “3 things you should consider in a content marketing strategy” for full details.

Simon Reynolds VP Marketing Airtasker

Your expedition destination is like your chosen goal and analytics gives you the framework to understand if the actions you are taking are making an impact against your chosen goals. You gain learnings that help you to continue down your strategic path or maybe you need to change course based on your new learnings. Analytics survival principles: • Forget the vanity metrics, and stick to the harshest, most stripped

down metric you can find, (that aligns with your strategy or even revenue). It may look worse, but when you move this number then it's more telling that your efforts are working.

• Create your top level dashboards, and look at them every day. Use these as your compass to understand how your journey is progressing.

• Understand how the data works, and don't take it at face value. Dig deeper to understand how numbers are made up, It's easy to say your data driven by reading your compass, but you really need to understand how it all works to understand the true meaning, to extract insights as well as understanding if there are other factors affecting your compass.

Analytics is like the framework on your map, you must enable marketing members to have access to the map, and make it crucial to their jobs. Their map and the framework is their window to their KPIs, so they should be able to understand what they need to do to make the numbers move, and be responsive and have learnings along the way. They should take ownership of their individual parts of the map, and understand them thoroughly, so they can lead the way.

“Of course you can navigate your way with our without a map and compass, but analytics gives you additional optionality around the possible course, and smarter

ways to get to where you want or need to go.”

Sam Kline- ANZ

Sam Kline Senior Manager. Products & Marketing (AU) ANZ

You need to know where you’re trying to go… analytics for the sake of analytics…you’re wasting everybody’s time! Analytics for action is the key, focus on driving insights for action, and/or decisions for maximum value! You need other people aligned and working with you, (not against!)...The ability to execute on insights often requires coordination across a number of areas…@ ANZ we use a simple value chain to explain how we need to align: Data -> Analytics -> Product/Segments -> Marketing -> Distribution, to ultimately get an insight-based communication with the customer! With each of these steps, a continuous feedback loop is critical to understand what’s working and not, in order to continue test & learn and improve. Continually reassess your course (conditions change often and quickly)…Test, Learn, Repeat…it’s obvious but unless you’re continually proving the value and adjusting as necessary, then you’re likely to be off course (or well behind). Analytics is not only like the investment in a good compass, it provides way more, such as smarts around choices, optionality, gamification and predictability, that’s what will ultimately lead you to your destination.

“Investigating, investing and innovating technology is really a form of conservation. All good trekkers know you don’t want to be weighed down with unnecessary and obsolete equipment.

Better quality and more suitable equipment will save time, money and ultimately last longer.”

Dr Peter Brawn – Gateway

Dr Peter Brawn Founder Gateway

Beyond essential equipment for a trek, adding a few extra pieces of kit can shine light on new approaches, mitigate risk and elongate the journey. For any business delving in the data arena, getting the balance between only adding equipment that will add value and getting dazzled by cool but ultimately short sighted tools can at times be tricky. Usually your fellow trekkers, (on your own team and in the broader community) are the best people to highlight what is being used effectively and what is dead weight. That solar shower purchase at the Camping Expo seemed like a good idea at the time! Tech is at the heart of our business, our research always has a technical component, for example eyetracking or biometrics tracking, which can help our team identify consumer insights that cannot be acquired via traditional market research methods. Evolution is normally a combination of improvement and efficiency, which is definitely the case in the behavioural research sphere. The overall approach; moving away from asking consumers to post rationalise their choices and behaviour is not brand new, but the developments in tech and data processing are opening this up to a broader range of uses, companies and in a timelier manner. Investing in tools that can assess a broad range of data points is a basic requirement for most organisations today but with so many marketers now using similar off the shelf martech stacks, adding something extra whether that be data or a novel analytical approach is vital to keep ahead of your competitors.

Data Activation

“We all know data analytics & discovery is transforming how organisations operate. Companies can gain incredible advantage by

predicting things like knowing what their customers want before they ask for it. But with the growing ocean of data available, the magic key is

needed to unlock the data gems that can make a difference.”

Rodd Martin – Smart Video Australia

Rod Martin CEO Smart Video Australia

For me the key is turning insights into meaningful touch points that will resonate with customers. That’s where the magic is – combining data with powerful creative ideas, and delivering them to customers in compelling ways. Without a doubt the two most essential ingredients in data activation are ‘creativity’ and ‘technology’. But in isolation they are nowhere near as powerful as both working seamlessly together. For us personalized video CX is a magic key for marketers. When crafted properly, data-driven personalised video CX is a seamless convergence of data, personalisation and video. It not only has the power to create memorable customer experiences, it can do it at scale, in real time. This means whenever the customer data is updated in the back-end, the video is instantly updated. Videos aren’t pre-rendered and hosted on a server, they’re streamed live, so updating the customer information and videos can happen on the fly. This allows organisations to do incredible things. A/B testing is simplified and offer enhancement or messaging can be refined on the fly. As financial services organisations move more of their customer interaction online, their ability to retain a personal relationship with customers diminishes. Engaging them through personalised video allows organisations to continue a one to one dialogue with their customers, but automate the process and do it at scale. Personalised customer on-boarding videos not only increase NPS they cut call center traffic.

Tim Hill Co-founder of Social Status and SocialROI.org

The real value unlocks for marketers when the full funnel is illuminated from a social perspective. A large proportion of marketers track some social metrics but don't have a full handle on performance from reach through to conversion on social. This is really critical because without it, there is really no way to assess the performance of social vs your other paid channels. In some cases once CPMs, CTRs and CPCons are determined, social can prove to be a far more cost effective medium than other digital channels - of course this is very dependent on your industry. Everyone is looking for actionable insights and with good reason. What's the point of data without action points? Marketers need to be continually optimising. "Perpetual beta" is a term that is gaining more traction and I totally agree with the premise because what worked last month, probably won't work next month. The challenge is finding the time and resources to find these insights and continually optimise. This is where you really need the power of a social analytics platform to do the hard number crunching and provide the "so what" component. The 2 magic ingredients for data activation: 1. Adopting a measurement framework that everyone in the business

understands and buys into. 2. Benchmark historically and competitively: without benchmarking there is

no way to gauge what's good and what's bad. A 2% Engagement Rate might be fantastic in one industry and terrible in another. That's why it’s important to always benchmark performance over time.

Social Status have established an open source social ROI Framework for marketers and businesses to assist in measuring and communicating the value of their social marketing activity, for more details see the blog here.

20+ Global & Local Speakers

+1 Social simulation session

+1 IQ Data in a Day intensive

SYDNEY 27 APRIL | MELBOURNE 29 APRIL

Data Day brings you a stellar line-up of global and local speakers who share their knowledge and real-life examples of how to overcome data challenges. Data Day 2016 also includes new interactive

additions you won’t want to miss.

www.admadataday.com.au

THANKS TO ALL OUR BRAND CONTRIBUTORS

www.admadataday.com.au

The Ultimate Data Driven Marketing Survival Kit was produced by Miranda Bond on behalf of ADMA.

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