Earlier this summer, SheerID had the incredible opportunity to host a webinar with Scott Dylag and learn about his experience building Nike’s data strategy and vision, and how he was able to leverage the power of our platform to help build lasting impact. Now that some time has passed, we wanted to revisit some of our thoughts during our time building out and presenting the webinar together.
Let’s face it: Headwinds facing marketers today are incredibly strong. Acquisition costs are soaring, and every brand is struggling to make connections with consumers in a relevant, meaningful, authentic way. The solution to fight these strong headwinds lies in knowing your customers at an unprecedented depth, which is an effort that is rooted in data. Specifically, customer data.
As soon as you see these words, “customer data”, you may have an inherent reaction. It’s different based on where you are in your data journey, right? Understanding that you need strong customer data is one thing—getting your house in order to leverage it is quite another. So how does a brand go about getting its data in order?
When trying to tackle data maturity, consider a phased approach described in our June webinar, Activating Data Across Your Marketing Tech Stack, as “Crawl, Walk, Run”. Simply recognizing where you are in the journey is the most important step to achieving growth.
Crawling: Your First Steps in the Data Game
The crawling phase is when it’s time to get started and “get in the game” with audience data. The critical component of the crawl phase is to get organizational alignment and to establish priority. You won’t graduate to the next phase without consensus and resource allocation. Any significant change initiative requires a clear, compelling “why”, and a bold enough vision that’s still attainable for your brand, and resonates with company strategy and future aspirations.
- Set the Strategic Vision: Clearly articulate the value of a customer data-centric marketing approach, tying it directly to broader company goals.
- Align Key Stakeholders: Identify crucial influencers and decision-makers, allowing for a tailored approach to addressing their specific “hot buttons.” For example:
- CMO- Acquisition/retention
- CFO-ROI/demand
- CTO -Technical lift/security
- Build Internal Advocacy: Proactively address stakeholder concerns and speak their language to garner essential support for the vision.
Once this internal alignment is secured, the practical data steps in the crawl phase involve designing and activating your first offers and establishing initial campaign positioning to drive awareness and early returns. This is where SheerID comes in to create exclusive audience offers (e.g., for students or military), promote them across channels, and enrich your CRM with verified data attributes through an in-brand verification process.
The great thing about the crawl phase is it typically requires minimal lift from engineering teams, making it an accessible starting point for demonstrating that tangible value you need to get to the next step.
Walking: Strengthening Systems & Building Momentum
As brands transition to Walking, the focus shifts to driving greater awareness and achieving tighter integration into the customer experience. With initial offers and processes established, brands can now expand their efforts to program timely and relevant offers around specific community moments throughout their 365-day marketing calendar. Aligning offers to specific community moments creates natural engagement opportunities with the audiences you are trying to authentically reach.
- Program Campaigns Around your Audiences: For students, think about back to school, and spring break. You can take this a step farther and align activities around college sports. If a school makes it to March Madness, consider offering a pulse discount to celebrate their team making it to the tournament. For military, medical, and first responder audiences, this means activating around Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Military Appreciation Month , or National Doctors and Nurses weeks.
- Enhance the Customer Experience: Integrate offers more natively into the CX using APIs and Webhooks to seamlessly embed verification and offer experiences directly into checkout flows or profile pages.
- Consider Your Peaks and Valleys: Outside of looking at events directly tied to your audiences, consider filling in other areas of your calendar with shop early or exclusive access events. These events can strategically pull demand out of peak periods, helping to make “peaks less peaky” as Scott Dylag, would say.
Running: Consistency That Yields Returns
The final phase of our data maturity model gives brands the ability to unlock the highest returns from a well-oiled customer data machine, while giving unique opportunities to test highly tailored, bespoke programming. Once brands get to their full stride, it’s hard to stop the momentum. Here, the primary objective is to automate the seamless flow of permissioned data directly into your Audience Data Platforms. This looks like:
- Enabling Deep Personalization: Automates data integration, allowing for the creation and execution of sophisticated, deeply personalized campaigns.
- Driving Significant Impact: Allows for high-impact initiatives, such as Nike’s donation of Zoom Pulse shoes to healthcare workers during COVID-19.
- Advancing Brand Vision: Consistently demonstrating strong returns, even from small initial investments, helps secure the necessary financial resources for further automation and integration.
Finding Your Pace
Regardless of whether you are barely crawling, or routinely setting a new record pace, SheerID can help you on your data journey.
Our platform gives brands the power to build their experiences based on what they are ready to achieve, with our focus being on customization, data ownership, and global instant verification.
No brand has mastered their customer data strategy; it needs to be constantly refined and tested to unlock new growth. SheerID’s Audience Data Platform empowers brands to take the permissioned data they acquire and connect it to their market platforms, regardless of their package level with us.
Want to keep up with your audience data and uncover opportunities, no matter what stage you’re in? Learn more about how to work with SheerID.