The current coronavirus scare and widespread lockdowns have highlighted the need for digital transformation; marketers need to build an implementation programme with strong foundations and smart data strategies to see success, says Laura Chaibi in The WARC Guide to Structuring for effectiveness.

This month, The WARC Guide looks at some crucial structural considerations for brand marketers looking to drive more effective marketing – including the central role that data plays. (Subscribers can read the full report here.)

In Digital transformation: A data game plan for better marketing, Laura Chaibi, an experienced consultant based in the UAE, notes that marketers are some of the first movers in businesses to undertake transformation.

“Many built marketing technology stacks, using a lot of data they do not own,” she points out. “They had control over this domain strategically and operationally.”

But the advent of new privacy laws and impending limits on the use of third-party data and data cookies mean marketers are having to rethink strategies and the data used to support them.

“This is a new game plan and involves building better internal bridges,” she states. “Digital transformation is a team sport and many CMOs historically did not build the team inside the business, as they dealt with everything outside the business.

“They now need to strike strong allegiances internally to transform from the inside out, as well as the outside in.”

As well as collaboration and teamwork, companies need to know which data to collect and how it should be structured – a challenge for many because someone still needs to consider the right business use cases, ask the right questions and find the right people to architect the solution, Chaibi says.

“Those people need to think about all-encompassing cases which cut across entire lines of business holistically – a new collaboration journey.”

They should also consider a skyscraper analogy: rather than thinking about data in ‘the cloud’, they should reimagine data as the groundwork that enables a multi-storey building to be confidently erected.

“The excavation phase and below ground foundations are the most important part of the build,” says Chaibi.

The WARC Guide is a compilation of fresh new research and expert guidance with WARC’s editorial teams in New York, London, Singapore and Shanghai pulling in the best new thinking globally. It also showcases the best on WARC – case studies, best practice and data sourced from across the platform.

Sourced from WARC