While you won’t find many marketers today disputing the need to embrace customer-oriented, data-driven marketing, the shift has raised on gigantic question: How do you know where to prioritise your data and customers efforts, and indeed, what areas you can feasibly improve digital interactions?

On 21 January, Fitness First kicked off a brand transformation initiative all in the name of engaging with customers better. Seven months on, the group has closed down its customer loyalty program, First Club, and is working on a new member offering that relies on customer data to deliver personalised and relevant rewards.

A fundamental disconnect between the way technology and business teams perceive customer data is resulting in lost opportunity for marketers, a Forrester Research principal analyst claims.

This year’s Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact conference brought together 1100 marketers to discuss the role of modern marketing, and the key ingredients, including technology, CMOs need to get there. A completely different but related theme was simultaneously circulating around breakout sessions and CMO’s discussions with customers at the event: Embarrassment.

When it comes to getting sponsorship for sporting events and clubs, Football NSW knows how important data is in making a compelling proposition. CEO of Football NSW, Eddie Moore, talks about the not-for-profit’s use of data analytics for driving revenue and investment into the game.

Bad data costs your organisation money. Last year, GS1, the company that is responsible for barcoding and product identification systems, released a report that found bad data costs grocery retailers $675 million in lost sales every year.

CMOs are the next natural CEOs within their organisations, according to McKinsey and Co.

Gleaning insights from vehicle and customer data has been key to the growth of car sharing company, GoGet, according to its co-founder, Bruce Jeffreys.

Implementing an all-in-one marketing platform is not only helping Qantas drastically improve campaign turnaround times, it’s also opening the door to personalised and real-time customer engagement and communication.

Having deep customer knowledge has become the new hygiene factor for brands looking to stay in business and meet consumer expectations, according to BT Financial Group’s head of customer insight and analytics.

Using data analytics to deliver personalised and proactive recommendations for job seekers has helped Seek to lift job application rates by up to four times.

IBM has deployed data analytics technology at its Heart of the City lighting sculpture in Sydney to map visitor movement and interaction at this year’s Vivid Festival.

For any marketer struggling under the weight of the data generated by CRM and other marketing systems, the last thing you may want to hear is that there is another class of data just waiting to be exploited.

Website analytics can be a powerful tool for increasing sales. But they can also prove useful in helping people in a time of crisis.

The retail space is undergoing a transformation thanks to digital disruption. As customers increasingly become digitally connected and communicative, retailers need to embrace both an omni-channel sales strategy, as well as a unified customer engagement approach to keep winning them over. It’s this digital track that the director of multi-channel at Athlete’s Foot, Mark Teperson, is running right now.

Yahoo will stop honoring "Do Not Track" requests made by a user's browser. It will now actively attempt to track an individual's interactions with its site and its content.

Amazon.com is an ecommerce behemoth that has put technology innovation and customer data at the heart of business development.

Big data is big news, and nowhere was this more apparent than at this year’s Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City.

Salesforce ExactTarget has released an Australasian State of Marketing annual report which shows data and analytics to be the top area of investment for regional marketers this year.

Big data has the ability to generate big opportunities for marketers, customers and wider society, but without organisational change we’ll all struggle to utilise it effectively.

CMOs can no longer live in a business silo and must find allies across the organisation, including the CIO, if they’re to meet the expectations of today’s customer.