Data in business is becoming critical, and often, it is becoming a competitive advantage. Let us take the example of Marketing – it has evolved from its traditional form into digital marketing covering the world of social media, video, mobile and many more forms of digital technologies that are evolving such as wearable devices being the next frontier.

The pressure on the marketing departments and the marketing heads has always been the proper justification of spend with the highest return of investment that can be obtained. This equation has become more complex as the marketing spend now gets divided into all the platforms, channels, and mediums that are available both in the offline and online world. The online world providing richer, engaging platforms and being data rich. They are becoming the first and most likely the primary focus of any marketing department.

With this new world, it is very important that data is leveraged to help streamline efforts. Justify spend with measurable, meaningful and effective metrics which provide greater insights from the digital marketing platforms.

Some key questions that should be asked from the data are:

• What is the Importance of this data – what to collect and where it comes from?
• What parts from both online and offline marketing data should we integrate?
• How can we demystify technical jargon surrounding web, mobile, social data?
• How to connect it to the business goals?
• Is the data allowing us to create meaningful segmentation?
• What analytics techniques to apply to measure, monitor and evaluate marketing data?
• How to use segmentation to derive customer insights to execute better effective campaigns?

Having data is the first step in the race and asking the correct questions from it is the feat.

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