Data secrets of successful marketers: three routes to success revealed

A new report from Customer Data Platform (CDP) Zeotap seeks to identify successful marketing practices and analyse the degree to which these were data-driven. Based on responses from 500 senior marketing leaders, it has highlighted three practices in particular with a close correlation to marketing success:

1. Dump the DMP for the CMP
   The research revealed that more successful marketers have already begun making the shift to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), with a 39-percentage point difference in CDP adoption between the least and most successful marketers. Meanwhile, with the usage of Data management Platforms [DMPs] decreasing as marketing success increases, these look to be heading for extinction.

2. Be ready for the cookieless future
   The vast majority of the 20 percent of successful marketers yet to do so (99 percent) will have built a single customer view, or ‘golden record’, by the time the last chorus of Auld Lang Syne dies away to usher in 2023; in time for Google’s much-vaunted cookie death-knell deadline. The least successful marketers, meanwhile, are more likely ‘putting all their eggs in one basket’, with nearly two-thirds (67 percent) gravitating to cohort-based advertising.

3. Welcome in the machine learning age
   It’s already showing high adoption, but research showed that even 50 percent of the marketer segment who struggled the most already claimed to be deploying machine learning, to drive insight and action at scale. The more successful the marketer, however, the higher this adoption figure climbs.

“As we enter a post-COVID and post-cookie world, we should expect rapid acceleration of data-driven marketing practices,” said Daniel Heer, Founder and CEO of Zeotap. 

The marketing leaders polled, all from companies with 250 or more employees, were asked recently how far above (or below) they achieved on their 2021 targets, and were then sorted into five distinct success archetypes according to their success. The respondents were then asked questions designed to analyze the degrees to which they were ‘data-driven’, and these responses were indexed against their success.

“For now, most marketers are in the starting phase of creating the usable dataset — the proverbial ‘golden record’ of a single customer view," continued Heer. "As most marketers complete this foundational phase next year, we can expect the second stage to begin, in the form of the race for skilled talent and pioneering machine learning.”