How Leveraging Data Enhances Business Processes

Insights for this month’s article provided by Jackie Guan, SVP, Global Data & Analytics at Marriott Vacations Worldwide and Mike Samet, Chief Executive Officer at Digital Ignite

Question: How are you using data to drive a particular segment of your business or develop your next generation of products? What areas do you see as the biggest growth opportunities in terms of how you use data?

Jackie Guan might not have a key in her hand, but nonetheless, she has been diligently unlocking the power of data and analytics at Marriott Vacations Worldwide (MVW) since joining the company a year ago as its SVP of Global Data & Analytics.

Jackie believes that the more actionable, accessible, and trustworthy data a company has, the more they can provide team members with self-service analytical tools. Here’s how her team is doing just that.

How MVW is Harnessing the Power of Data

With clean and accurate data, MVW’s data scientists and analysts use advanced analytics to improve efficiency, enhance the customer experience, and increase profitability.

Marketing and customer analytics, for example, uses data and analytical techniques to understand customer behavior, preferences, and interactions with marketing efforts. Learning about people’s vacation preferences helps the company better understand its customers, which allows MVW to provide optimized service and product offerings to improve owner satisfaction as well as attract new customers.

Another key area where data and analytics play crucial roles at MVW is through predictive analytics, where models are built to forecast supply, demand, and sales.

On the customer and associate experience side, data-driven personalization techniques are used to deliver content, offers, and recommendations.

Finally, MVW is focused on increasing operational efficiencies through optimization algorithms, as well as automating routine tasks and processes through artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML).

Looking Ahead
Thus far, MVW has completed an enterprise data analytics strategy for the future, welcomed a number of data scientists, analysts, and data stewards, and continued to strengthen the company’s data foundation. Recently, MVW took a giant step toward enabling data-driven decisions by streamlining tools and processes when it consolidated to a new business intelligence platform, which will allow for more self-service analytics capabilities.

The biggest opportunity in terms of delivering value to the business is leveraging advanced analytics techniques such as AI/ML, as well as educating and preparing MVW to harness data in all parts of the business.

In order to truly take advantage of new technologies and innovations, teams must have a strong data foundation, from gathering data to ongoing management and governance of the data. It’s also important to remember that high-quality data is absolutely critical in these efforts.

As a digital marketing agency, the team at Digital Ignite thrives on data collection. Much like Jackie’s team, Digital Ignite utilizes data to help their clients reach key audiences through storytelling that is based on the insights they gain through this collection.

Digital Ignite CEO Mike Samet says there are five key tenets that his team is constantly innovating and building on to deliver data-driven solutions to clients. His insights into each tenant are below:

1. Data Consolidation and Integration: CRM has the roadmap to a company’s next revenue goal. Capture and consolidation technology is growing at a rapid pace, and the data it generates is invaluable. Merging data from CRM, social channels, and all lead generation opportunities into one ecosystem is imperative in 2024 and beyond, as it provides the opportunity to accomplish the following:
   • The ability to reach audiences at multiple touchpoints – on the go on mobile devices, at work on desktops, at home on smart TVs, etc.
   • Stack platforms for optimal targeting capabilities – As channels of delivery have diverse targeting restrictions (e.g., certain platforms do not allow for income-based targeting, others have limited political affiliation targeting), leveraging as many platforms as possible increases the ability to activate targeting potential.
   • Use sequential messaging – Telling consumers a story through ads delivered temporally across multiple devices and channels.
2. Advanced Analytics and AI:  The team at Digital Ignite has relied heavily on using first-party data to build the models and predictive mapping to deliver the best long-term results for clients. One of the most recognizable ways to do this is to use data to segment customers and personalize their journey. 
3. Customer Segmentation and Personalization:  On almost all long-term client campaigns, there are multiple strategies involving both media placement and creative to reach a common KPI which is usually revenue based.  When establishing KPIs, there should be a very clear segmentation between entry-level customers and a lifetime customer in both messaging and delivery tactics. This produces a data feedback loop that can lead to:
   • Understanding the best ways to educate entry-level customers and expedite their movement down the funnel.
   • Retaining and incentivizing the most loyal and highest value customers.
   • Segmenting customer decision-making insight to inform research and development, ultimately improving a company’s product or service.  
   • Improving overall ROI.
4. Marketing and Sales Optimization: Once the necessary data is collected and the positive feedback loop is established, it’s time to evolve the company’s offerings and product lines. In fact, with enough data, companies can take these evolved product offerings and turn them into their next big revenue generator.
5. Collaboration and Partnerships: Utilizing both loyal customers and influencers, new data-driven product lines can be used to solicit a company’s next line of messaging.  UGC (User Generated Content) not only offers very cost-effective creative opportunities, but it’s also one of the most authentic ways to reach a customer base.  This authentic approach to communicating with an audience yields the best returns in the long term.

In the evolving digital world, leveraging data whenever possible is truly essential to the industry’s success. When that data is properly applied to key segments of the business, it can grow top and bottom-line revenue to unprecedented levels.