Navigating Your Brand’s Data Maturity Journey: A Guide To Success

The importance of data is not lost of many business owners and strategists.

However different organisations find themselves at different stages of data maturity. What is clear however, is that brands who focus on data-driven insights and strategies often find those marginal competitive advantages in order to stay ahead. Amazon, often viewed as the paragon for a data-led brand, recently claimed that 35% or more of its total sales are generated from data-driven insights.

Nevertheless, even enterprise sized brands can find themselves at the wrong end of the spectrum, having grown organically or through their own “tried and tested” approaches to marketing and sales. These businesses may soon reach saturation without finding ways to become more data-centric.

In this article we’ll explore the different stages of data maturity, and how by utilising a platform like Optsi, e-commerce brands can move through the stages and take a more data-led approach to their strategy.

The Stages of Data Maturity

Source: Google

1. Data Challenged

The first step on the road to recovery is recognising that you have a problem to begin with. Some of the symptoms of being a Data Novice brand include;

• No view of the data to begin with: data will exist somewhere (it always does), but you have little or no visibility of it, nor have access to it. An example of this could be a marketing agency holding all the performance data for your marketing channels, or a custom e-commerce platform not providing regular or easily digestible reports on your store performance.

• Too many sources of information (i.e. no source of truth): You may have access to data, however it’s spread across multiple different platforms, resulting in fragmentation or data silos. This can often lead to internal challenges, with different teams using differing sources in an attempt to align strategy. In this case, nobody wins and can create friction across the business.

• Lack of resource and skill gaps: bringing and managing data in-house is expensive. Very expensive. We alluded to it in a recent article. Simply put, many growth brands don’t have the resources to invest in internal data analysts or data scientists. Many tech solutions that offer the world are also often too expensive to warrant the investment.

• Resistance & fear: becoming a data-driven brand can be a drastically new way of thinking - whether a brand is established, growing or starting-up. Brands can be resistant to move away from what’s worked in the past, and could be fearful of the truth insights data can bring.

These symptoms aren’t unique to a single type of business. Many global, multi-million dollar brands are data-challenged, as their growth has been driven by “what’s worked in the past”, or is built off old software that isn’t up to today’s standards.

Equally, many scaling brands have invested their money in either marketing or product without the need for data, but as teams expand and costs rise, the need for a coherent data strategy becomes more apparent.

The Optsi Solution: Alignment

The first step any Data Challenged brand needs to make is to align their data into a single source of truth. This sounds complex, but is easier than it sounds.

• Utilise the tools and data you already have: At Optsi, we have integrations with many of the key tools and platforms that you’ll be using, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Meta, Google, GA4, Klaviyo and TikTok. By bringing all of these data sources together in Optsi, you’ll immediately remove the lack of visibility and data silo challenges.

• Use a cost-effective solution: With prices starting at $99 per month, it offers significant cost savings compared to bringing everything in house, as well as some of the existing tech in the market.

• Partner with experts: hiring data scientists and data analysts may be out of your price range, but with Optsi you’ll be using a tool designed and developed by a team of data scientists and BI experts. We’d love to help you on your journey!

2. Data Conscious

You have your data aligned, and you could well be using third-party dashboards to pull some reports on your business performance (i.e. sales, returns, marketing spend etc). You also understand the importance of data, but you now need it to extract it’s value for the good of your strategy.

If your data just sits there, then it adds little-to-no value. If your solution isn’t cost effective, it becomes a burden and can be the first thing to go if the business looks to cut costs. You’re then right back at the beginning.

To get the most out of your data solution and move your brand to the next level, it needs to be effective across different areas of the business (from ecommerce, marketing and purchasing), as well as being easily relatable at management and executive level for a buy-in at every level.

The Optsi Solution: Data Visualisation

Now you have your platforms synced to Optsi, it’s time to start utilising the reports to make more informed decisions across the business. The Optsi platform provides in-depth insights that can help drive a brand’s strategy, and move them forward to the next level of their data maturity.

• Business Performance: as well as knowing what your year-on-year / month-on-month sales, it’s key to get a fast, near-real time view on factors such as Product Profit, Sales vs. Returns, New vs. Returning Customers and promo-code usage. From this you’ll be able to quick establish trends on key performance indicators.

• Marketing Effectiveness: Understand the base impact of your marketing efforts. The Optsi platform tracks key metrics across your marketing strategy, including spend, sales, ROAS, marketing efficiency (MER) and the cost of acquiring new customers (CAC), allowing you to monitor and amend strategy based on your company’s objectives.

• Inventory: What’s the current value of your inventory, and the estimated profit margins? The Optsi platform can uniquely provide these trends over time.

• Customer View: What’s your Churn Rate and how much revenue has that cost? How many new customers are you bringing into the business? In order to maximise your retention, it’s crucial to understand your customer base.

By using the Optsi platform to regularly and succinctly report on these key metrics allows for you to get buy-in across the business and at every level, and begin to make more informed, data-decisions.

3. Data Guided

You now understand and are utilising the data you have at your disposal, and what is more, the company buys into data being a strategic asset. As a Data Guided company, you’ll be able to extract insights and value from their data, for instance;

• Recognising winning (or losing) marketing strategies and understanding why it won (or failed).
• Sufficiently segmenting your customers based on behaviour or demographics.
• Creating data-aligned workflows, including reporting.

You’ll be making incremental gains, however if you want to move on and be a fully Data-Centric brand, you need to be using your data to identify and drive significant optimisations across the business.

The Optsi Solution: Optimisation & Strategic Growth

Using the insights from your marketing and platform data, e-commerce brands can use Optsi’s Correlation Analyser to full interpret which marketing channels are having the greatest impact on sales and web sessions. This tool will allow you to make more informed, data-driven optimisations on your marketing strategy, ultimately boosting and improving key metrics such as ROAS, CAC and MER.

We’ve highlighted the pros and cons of different marketing measurement / attribution models before, and it’s our belief that correlation analysis is the most cost-effective and privacy friendly solution for e-commerce brands, certainly for those on the beginning of their journey or on a lower budget.

4. Data Driven

So now your data is aligned, your business is bought in at every-level on it’s strategic importance, and it’s now core to driving business strategy and optimisations. Congratulations, you are now a Data-Centric brand! Amazon would be proud (we assume).

Now it’s a case of continuously evolving with new ways of thinking. For instance, can Machine Learning or AI enhance my data? What new insights can be derived from the data we have, or what new data can we obtain to help us make even greater optimisations?

These are questions the Optsi team ask ourselves daily, and are striving to make these available to our customers!

Summary

Going through the Data Maturity process can be daunting, whether it’s down to lack of resources or understanding.

At Optsi, we’re here to help brands through this journey - regardless of their current set-up and without the need to invest heavily in internal data analysts or data scientists.

Just starting out but want to be a data-led brand? Optsi can help align all your data in a cost-effective manner that gives you a full-view of your business performance.

Growing brand but has disregarded data and reporting in favour of product or “what’s always worked”? Optsi can bring everything together, and provide the tools and insights needed to become more data-focused.

You have a view of data, but can’t make it work for your business? Optsi can help identify trends across your organisation, from store performance, to marketing efficiencies and inventory analysis, to help you understand not only “what” has happened, but also “why”.

You have visibility of your data, but your marketing strategy has been led by platform metrics or cookie-based attribution and is now redundant and you’re struggling to optimise? Optsi can provide a clear view of marketing performance at a channel, tactic and ad set level, helping you understand the real performance of your media and where to optimise.

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We’d love to talk to you to discuss how Optsi can help you on your journey into becoming a more data led brand.

To book some time with our team, please get it touch! Book some time with Optsi!

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