It is always interesting to note the propositions of companies who specialise in software for marketers. For many of the executives leading from the front, it creates a strong narrative. Having been marketing leaders at their previous employer, they understand the problems their compatriots are going through – and, more importantly, how they can be solved.
Mark Green, EMEA marketing director at cloud-based business intelligence firm DOMO, is a case in point. Having spent half a dozen years at Rackspace before joining DOMO in April, he not only understands the power of cloud, but the importance of gaining a single source of data at pace.
“As a marketing leader, you interpret and receive the most data coming into the business, whether it’s the agencies creating for you, the feeds from social, the impact on marketing you’re creating into your CRM of choice, that overarching relationship with performance and that measurement to, ultimately, ROI,” he tells MarketingTech. “But then the way the business interprets that back is always: where are the leads? Where are the leads coming from? How much did the leads cost?
“There’s an element of that which is always a moment in time – so you are constantly almost chasing your tail to have a point of view on that which can be presented,” he adds.
Green remembers a ‘functional’ review of performance each month – but always produced in tandem with an operations team. Giving marketers the freedom to take charge of their data insights is why DOMO, among others, does what it does.
“Imagine the journey of data a customer goes on,” says Green. “The first stage of that is the number of sources of data that come into the business. Because of the growth of this infrastructure base that provides data to learn from, the pressure on a business to learn and interpret that is growing enormously. What DOMO does is sits right in the middle of that journey – so it attempts to be a single source for that data to resonate.”
The special sauce, Green believes, is in DOMO’s ‘always-on’ capability. “A web-based dashboard – so the idea of playing that data back anytime, on any device – allows you and your business to have access to the most up-to-date, accurate data.” he says. “Then fundamentally what that does is change the relationship data has with the business. Teams have trust in their data and can make informed decisions based on it.”
“It means I know I’m not alone as a marketing leader,” Green adds. “If I go back to my previous role, the relationship I had with agencies would have been at the end of each quarter. The idea now of that data being always-on, accessible by everybody, for everybody, changes that relationship with data, and what really is what DOMO is here to do.”
Green likens the situation to preparing for the unknown – a particularly prescient thought given the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Of the five industries DOMO primarily targets – finance, high tech, manufacturing, media and retail – the latter was badly affected by lockdown; not just for outlets being closed, but the panic buying and subsequent gaps in stock beforehand.
‘Accept what we’re in, but prepare for recovery and all the curveballs thrown at it’ is how Green sums it up. “The demands of data have become huge,” he adds. “One, we’ve got to prepare for the world we’re in now, but two, we have to have that view on what things will look like coming out of it.”
In spite of the uncertainty and disruption caused by the pandemic, one trend has emerged. Companies with a nagging feeling they needed to change – too many offline pockets, not enough connection between data sources and user journeys – lost their inhibitions.
What’s more, old flames are being reignited. When talking to businesses who Domo has previously engaged with, amid the ‘very different’ world from when they last connected. “We’re uncovering all sorts of ‘well, yes, we didn’t really understand half of the problems that we’re facing out – so let’s talk,'” he notes.
Alongside the proactivity – allowing marketers to own their insights – and the flexibility of being cloud-based, Green cites accessibility – another part of always-on – as a key factor in the martech deck. “One of the things I like the most [about DOMO], genuinely, is that I can set alerts,” he says. “Every time an opportunity created by marketing is closed or rejected, I get an alert on my phone, which gives me 24/7/365 [visibility], or close, to the things I need to be at.
“Regardless of how good your data is, how good your Salesforce instance is, most people will come in, turn that on, hit refresh and see what happened overnight. To an extent, you’re on the backfoot,” Green adds.
DOMO is participating at DMWF Virtual later this week (September 16-17) and Green is looking forward to rekindling what he calls the basic tenet of marketing: getting in front of the right people at the right time. “That has just literally stopped,” he says. “Where I’m interested in having conversations is: how do you use data to look at the pipeline that you’re working? How are you communicating, probably differently and better, with those stage one, two, three, four conversations that would normally work at a pace?
“The word we try to bring together in most of our marketing activities is trust,” Green adds. “Not necessarily trusting us as a business, but allowing the kind of handshake to then have decision-making accuracy, and that every single piece of data is available at all times. Trust in your data, and the significance of that, is really what drives the conversation forward.”
Read more: How democratising data has been vital for healthcare brands during Covid-19
Photo by Jacqueline Munguía on Unsplash
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