Oracle helps Kenyan marketers step into the future

Oracle Africa recently held a Marketing forum dubbed: Marketing and Technology conversations, in a bid to help the marketing community in Kenya to move towards technology when it comes to targeting modern customers.

The event which was held at Oracle Africa’s offices in Nairobi, Kenya, was opened by Ms. Janet Kamau, Marketing manager, Oracle Africa, who took the chance to talk about the role of analytics in marketing, saying it’s a trend that is: “making marketers tick in this day and age”.

“It is important for marketers to be aware of the current trends to be able to cope with the future. Internalising change can help us as marketers to reach the younger customers,” added Ms. Kamau.

Ms. Joyce Ochieng, Big data and analytics cloud product lead, Oracle Africa, reiterated Ms. Kamau’s thoughts on future thinking marketing organisations; stating that marketing organisations which have entered the future and are data-driven, when it comes to decision making, are indeed outperforming their peers.

“When you look at the statistics 75 percent of CEO’s would like their CMOs to be ROI focused; and on the other end 92 percent of the CMOs want to be data driven, and they want to use the data to quantify their value in the market,” continued Ms. Ochieng.

According to findings from the Economist Intelligence Unit, companies that rate themselves substantially ahead of their peers in their use of data are three times more likely to rate themselves as substantially ahead in financial performance.

What makes data-driven organisations stand out

Data-driven organisations consider more data than their peers:-

These data-driven organisations run many experiments and analyse the outcome to get the best and more accurate way to go about it in the future.

Data-driven organisations obsess about learning not technology:-

For data-driven organisations it’s about learning, learning more about their customers segments and what channels they should use to reach them best.

Data-driven organisations have a people development plan for applying analytics:-

The more your team continues to interact and analyse the data the more they continue to learn.

Data-driven organisations treat data as an asset:-

These organisations tend to consider both existing data and data gotten from social media as a way of understanding the market better and also getting to know their customers.

Moving towards being a data-driven organization is no small fete as it takes a large investment to fully exploit the potential of an organisation’s data.

According to research conducted by EY Global , based on questions posed to various companies, it was revealed that the major challenges to adopting a data- driven strategy for most companies are as follows:

• 32% of respondents admitted to being overwhelmed by data.
• 33% saw organizational structure as being the key influence on success for big data projects.
• 47% cite- “adapting organizational culture to integrate big data” as a key challenge.
• 50% view poor data quality as a key concern, with the same percentage quoting ROI as a key challenge to projects.

Marketing for the future

Oracle though, is looking to make the transition towards being a data-driven marketing organisation much easier with solutions such as Oracle Marketing, which is an internet-based marketing management application, which automates the entire marketing process, evaluates return on investment (ROI), and facilitates continuous improvements in campaign performance.

Oracle Marketing empowers marketers to plan, manage, execute, analyze and maximize returns on all customer-centric marketing activities. Oracle Marketing functions include comprehensive campaign and list management; campaign fulfillment and execution; customer and partner management; iMarketing for web based marketing; and message and collateral management.