'Marketers use less than 5% of available data to make data-driven decisions'

While we know the importance of mobile, jumping on the mobile bandwagon is never an easy task for marketers starting out in the field. According to Jay Dalvi (pictured), product specialist at CleverTap, some reasons for this included a lack of access to real-time data, which hinders marketers from running campaigns in real-time. This was said during a Digital Marketing Indonesia conference held on 29-30 November 2017.He explained that it has traditionally been tough to keep track of the same user across multiple platforms, as data was often disconnected due to the manual handling of data between two systems. This made it difficult for data to be scalable. He added:Typical marketers use less than 5% of available data to make data-driven decisions. This is akin to using only a fraction of your brain.Because only a small fraction of data available is being used in decision-making, this puts marketers at a risk of inserting their own biases and prejudices, he explained.“For example, if a marketer captures 250 to 500 classes of data, in our experience, they are only likely to leverage on between two to 25 data points for a campaign. This is a small fraction compared to data that is available,” he said.“This is because marketers are creative creatures, but most would prefer to not work with analytical data modelling despite loving the marketing insights.”Agreeing with him was Cameron Richards, CEO of CPR Vision, who added that because of the opportunities and innovations garnered from data, what marketers are doing yesterday is no longer relevant today. Because of this, old school advertising isn't as effective as it used to be.He added there were 60 trillion individually indexed web pages out there, and 90% of the data today was created in the past two years. The average email user also gets 416 commercial messages a month.As such, being relevant and having the ability to connect will become a greater challenge for marketers. He said that moving forward, data and digital will also become the lifeblood of any organisation’s success.“When it comes to problem solving in an organisation, marketers also need to remember that certain types of data can only solve problems in certain situations,” Richards said.For example, when it comes to delivering results and ROI, leveraging the right data can help marketers understand which ROI they should be identifying and capturing to meet business objectives. Because of this, marketers need to know the difference between big data and smart data.Richards explained that big data often deals with what is known as the five Vs – volume, velocity, veracity (accuracy), variety and value. To identify big data problems, marketers need to look out for which part of the five Vs has the potential to overwhelm the others.Smart data, however, is a little more nuanced. It is the subset of that data that will actually apply to your problem – that can be used intelligently in a way that takes you towards a solution.“It is the difference between seeing a long list of numbers referring to weekly sales versus identifying the peaks and trends in sales volume over time,” Richards said.As consumer behaviour is completely changing, it is important for brands to identify these changes and adapt to them.According to Abithab Bhaskar, CEO of the international business at Netcore Solutions, if companies cannot adopt the behavioural change, they will not be relevant anymore.He explained that the mobile phone is now seen as one of the main platforms of disruption. This is from data consumption and the behaviour of customers which can be observed on this platform. As such, disruption is happening much quicker in Indonesia given the rising rate of mobile penetration.“It’s up to us to create disruption within our own industries, and in this market in particular, it is happening much faster than you can imagine,” he said.