Helping to create a culture of data-driven decision-making is something I care about passionately, so it was a pleasure to host a discussion on this topic with three leading Australian marketers at an AANA Masterclass event in April.
Susan Coghill, CMO of Tourism Australia, Naomi Gorringe, Head of Marketing at Southern Cross Austereo, and Tamara Howe, CMO at SunRice, contributed to a very insightful conversation. Here are my highlights from three key areas we discussed.
1. How to build a culture of data-driven decision-making
Describing herself as “a complete marketing effectiveness nerd”, Susan said she aimed to add “strategic rigor” and a renewed focus on marketing effectiveness to the creative excellence that Tourism Australia is known for.
“One of the first things that that I focused on was developing a playbook for what great destination marketing looks like. It didn’t exist, so we had to write the rules ourselves,” Susan said.
Called “The 10 Principles of Great Destination Marketing”, it includes a full funnel analysis of each market, including where TA and its competitors sit within the funnel and the drivers of how people choose a destination.
Explaining how this builds a culture of data-driven decision-making, Susan said: “It’s not a deck, it’s not a presentation, it’s something that our team uses every single day to inform every single discussion.”
Tamara described SunRice as a business where the consumer is “the boss” and hailed the “great” insights and analytics team. When it comes to building a data-first culture, she said: “It’s all about democratizing data through the organization. It’s important that everyone has data at their fingertips.”
Both Tamara and Susan also mentioned the importance of training. Susan talked about building “a culture of curiosity around effectiveness” that leads marketers to ask “what works, why, and how do we do more of it to eke out more incremental growth?”
Naomi built on this by outlining the “big journey” SCA has been on around data for the past four years. “We’ve been trying to understand all of the different parts of the business, what their data literacy is… and then really leaning in and meeting people where they are,” she said.
Speaking a common language to demonstrate how data is going to help people make decisions and how it’s going to help them reach their goals is also important, Naomi noted.
2. How to use data to generate actionable insights
There was agreement that there is little point in collecting high quality data and generating incisive insights if the latter are not actioned.
Susan began by talking about how, due to a lack of first-party data, TA was focused on making better use of the data they did have and supplementing it with third-party data.
Noting that she had to make “very strategic choices about how we spend every single dollar to drive most impact”, she outlined how data was used to inform which markets to target.
Consumer spend data, competitive spend data, and airline capacity data were analyzed to find out which markets were underserved. “This highlighted an opportunity in Korea that led us to raise it on our list of priority markets and start funding it with more brand activity,” Susan said. “It’s really about how you make best use of a range of data sources to understand what’s happening.”
For Tamara, marketing mix modelling (MMM) was a key tool that helped SunRice to generate actionable insights. “MMM showed that TV had a lower ROI than social, but TV was driving the most volume,” she explained.
However, she noted that “you can’t just simply interpret that data as ‘move money from TV to social’”. Instead, it served as an important piece of evidence in wider conversations about channel choice that had to be “carefully managed”.
At SCA, Naomi said data-informed insights were helping to develop better campaigns for clients. Tools they were using could infer when a listener was commuting, at work, or on a run, for example.
Using this data, SCA was able to create and serve relevant and contextual messages with much more granularity. “Talking to the right people at the right time helps the media dollar work harder,” Naomi said.
3. How data-driven decision-making helps to serve customers in uncertain times
In the current environment, many marketers are under huge pressure to demonstrate the impact and value of their investments.
Naomi said SCA was leaning on data partnerships to help them understand how consumer behavior is changing in response to certain events, such as the Australian federal election in May.
By looking at what people are spending their money on, for example, and how that is changing for listeners of different radio networks, Naomi said they could create content “that’s going to be relevant for those audiences in that short period leading up to the election.”
In contrast, Susan focused on the longer term. “Don’t confuse fast change with deep change,” she said. “Data can help you understand the meaningful changes that are going to stick over time and what are the things that are just trends.”
She cited scenario planning as a data-led technique she used to inform decision-making around how the cost-of-living crisis will impact people’s desire to travel in the future.
“It’s about blending timeless human truths with new signals so that you can stay creatively interesting and get cut through, but also commercially relevant,” Susan concluded.
Susan Coghill, Naomi Gorringe, and Tamara Howe were speaking at From data to decisions: Driving profitable growth with marketing effectiveness, a Marketing Masterclass event by the AANA in partnership with Gain Theory.