South East Asia companies not realising full potential of data-driven marketing strategies: BCG

South East Asia businesses are not fully tapping the potential of data-driven marketing strategies to increase revenue and realise cost efficiencies, says The Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm and an advisor on business strategy, in its latest research along with Google.

The research said the most digitally mature brands report significant benefits from data-driven marketing, with an average incremental 11% revenue impact and 17% in cost efficiencies.

The ‘Digital Marketing Maturity Study’ surveyed over 30 brands across seven industries (Retail, Education and Training, Consumer, Automotive, Travel and Leisure, Entertainment Media and Telco and Financial Service) from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong.

The result found no brands achieved the potential of multi-moment digital marketing in the region — that is, those that exceed consumer expectations by consistently delivering coordinated, relevant and sequenced experiences across a range of online and offline channels.

“Brands in SEA are yet to reach the full potential of multi-moment marketing, which is an approach that optimises single-customer business outcomes across multiple channels by delivering meaningful connections with consumers,” said Luc Grimond, Partner and Managing Director at BCG Singapore.

The study assessed brands across industries and their maturity levels on a four-point scale: nascent, emerging, connected, multi-moment stage. Companies at a nascent stage typically execute simple campaigns mainly using external data and direct buys, with limited links to sales. As brands mature, they improve discrete channel activation and then go a step further to more connected, multi-channel activation, with a demonstrated link to ROI and sales proxies. The study found that it is a progressive journey for companies to navigate through the four phases of digital maturity.

According to the study, BCG and Google identified some clear steps on the path of the digital maturity. The least mature brands can get started by setting the foundations, including identifying a senior sponsor, leveraging partners to fill capability gaps, understanding available data and building on that by implementing the back-end technology and analytics required to progress.

Brands can build connections both in bringing cross-functional teams together and connecting data to drive automation — by breaking down barriers between 'traditional' and 'digital' marketing capabilities, embedding scarce skills such as data scientists, and using them to define common KPIs and a measurement framework that feeds into message delivery and optimisation.

The researchers believe there is a strong imperative for brands to respond to the rising expectations of their consumers.

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