At this years’ IC Summits Marketing and Advertising Exchange (ICS MAX) in Atlanta Georgia, Adverity’s Director of North America, Dany Eid sat down with Jeff Coleman of Carter's, the leading brand of children's clothing, gifts and accessories in America, to discuss how he improved his team’s data capabilities in his role as Leader of Digital Marketing Science.
Here are a few key points in case you missed it!
What problems has data analytics solved for Carter’s lately?
“If you’ve ever dealt with web data you know there’s a lot of data out there. Once we were able to automate that, we were able to think about how we make our marketing strategies more impactful,” says Jeff.
Jeff’s team was able to look at specific performance within different tactics and campaigns, and how people were interacting in different locations. “You start to get down to who the customers are, where they are, what they like. We were able to see in real-time that a certain campaign, on the whole, is having this type of conversion rate. But we could also dig deeper to see that, for whatever reason, at that point in time, our customers in Chattanooga were really responding to what we were doing. So we ramped up more dollars there.”
So how did Jeff and his team manage to get Carters’ data capabilities to this point?
1. Get insights at the speed of business
“A personal mantra of mine is, how do you deliver insights at the speed of business?” says Jeff.
The marketing landscape moves quickly, and as we’ve seen the past couple of years, customer behavior can change at the drop of a hat. If getting insights from data means that you’ve got to pull data, integrate it, and put together a report every single time, you could well miss your window of opportunity.
A personal mantra of mine is, how do you deliver insights at the speed of business?
Jeff Coleman, Leader of Digital Marketing Science, Carter's
“I wanted to transition the mindset from ‘where's this report’ to ‘what is the analytics guiding us to do as a business’. I wanted to make sure we’d have the insights at our fingertips when it’s time to make a business decision. ”
Jeff joined the Carter’s team back in March of last year, and it soon became apparent that there were a lot of manual processes going on. “Our channel managers were inundated with pulling data in a manual way from disparate platforms. One of my goals was to see how quickly we could move out of that manual space of collecting data in spreadsheets.”
“I spent a lot of my first year getting the table stakes out of the way and getting the tools and data lakes set up for the future success we want.”
2. Use insights to pin-point successful marketing strategies
So what do you do once you’ve got all these marketing data insights at your fingertips?
“The less time you spend on data collection, the more time you can spend on the more challenging value add - telling a story with the data,” explains Jeff.
With routine reporting on autopilot, his team is able to focus more deeply on customer segmentation, and customer journey mapping.
The less time you spend on data collection, the more time you can spend on telling a story with the data
Jeff Coleman, Leader of Digital Marketing Science, Carter's
“We can start to get more prescriptive and predictive insights to deliver the right message at the right time to current customers and prospective buyers.”
“This means we can develop marketing strategies in a way that tells us, if we do x y z, it will make this specific impact in this region at this moment in time.”
3. Create a data-driven culture
Tech scares some people. You can’t always lead with the data strategy and expect everyone to be on board. If you want to move the needle on making your company’s culture more data-driven, then it’s important to consider how you frame your points.
“The most important thing I always go back to is ‘start with the business.’ What's your model, and what problems are you trying to resolve? Not everyone gets this world of analytics, but everyone has some business problem they’re trying to resolve.”
Jeff suggests addressing the outcomes first - explain the problem, and how to solve the problem, and then start to bring in how data is part of that solution.
Not everyone gets this world of analytics, but everyone has some business problem they’re trying to resolve.
Jeff Coleman, Leader of Digital Marketing Science, Carter's
“It can be a challenge to get senior leaders on board sometimes. They tend to be more mature; many of them come from an era where they had insights in a binder. You have to roll with it, figure out the best way to get them comfortable with absorbing information, and how to bridge that gap.”
“I’ve had the most success when I can put something interactive like a live dashboard in their hands. Once they get to play with it and interact, it’s like opening the floodgates for them. They don’t want to go back to stale reporting.”
By understanding your audience and catering to your leaders, you can begin to bridge that gap and create a culture that supports data-driven marketing.
