Data-driven Marketing: The Ultimate Guide To Success ft. Renata Dadic

Renata Dadic:- Only if we know what our customers and prospects want from us will we be successful and generate growth accordingly, I’m sure it’s right. Yeah, I think we have now 9832 possibilities to make some tools and marketing tactics. So it’s simply impossible to keep an overview, especially if you are not a technologist who specializes in it. So I think the proof is that data and technology is first and foremost, a people’s business. You have to talk to each other to stay calm, not to take the questions personally because they only want to understand what is going on, but it’s true, if you can’t measure something and take the data to analyze the campaign or the implementation of a product,  it’s not working anymore.

Shelly Singh:- Hello and welcome to The Growth Genius series brought to you by DMAAsia and Infidigit. My name is Shelly and I’m the country director – Americas at Infidigit, I’m also the founder and director at DMAAsia. In this Growth Genius series, the world’s best marketers and business leaders are interviewed about the brands they have worked on, their successful campaign strategies, how they got noticed by their customers and how they delivered better customer experiences to drive growth. In each episode we want to share the big idea that inspires these marketers, the campaign trail they used to execute it and how it all came together. Welcome to the Growth Genius Series.

Today we have a special guest all the way from Germany, Renata Dadik, she is responsible for marketing services, media and website at Deutsche Bank. She has 28 years of experience in the areas of product and project management and now working in digital marketing for the last five years. She’s fascinated and inspired by data and technology every day in her job. A very warm welcome, Renata.

Renata: – Hello, Shelly, thanks for having me.

Shelly: – Great. To start with, tell us about your background of how you started in data driven marketing and technology?

Renata: – Yeah, I am a true banking child, as you said, I joined Deutsche Bank 28 years ago and made my first professional experience in various areas at the private bank in Germany. In addition to my knowledge about retail banking and conceptual skills, I also made my first leadership responsibilities and expertise experience in the last 15 years. The last 10 years, I think, yeah, 2013 I have focused on digital marketing, digital transformation, campaign and implementation management and I focused always to see it from the view of the customer, whether it’s internally or externally because as I see I use the app, the banking app, the internet banking, you saw the first social media ads and I was interested in how it is working, how you can collect the data and use the data to make it more better and more professionally for us. So me and my team used our expertise to implement for example a new technology platform for Deutsche Bank for dynamic and personalized customer and prospect targeting, based on Adobe technology. Currently as you said I’m responsible for the marketing service media and website management division at a private bank here in Germany in Frankfurt. You can imagine it’s as a foundation, we ensure that marketing is able to work. We analyze all available data and offer our customers optimal solutions. In this way,  we present our brands as Deutsche Bank and Post Bank in media, social media, Google and so for and so on and generate leads with that with the technologies and also optimize our brand’s website, so to see where the leads are coming to our websites, are the customer flows the right ones or do we have some adoption on it. At the same time marketing services are also part of this division, we have an overall review on budget planning and spending and marketing, we definitely know where the campaigns are running, where they’re not running and take all the data together.

Shelly: – Wow. That’s a lot of work.

Renata: –  Yes, it is, but it’s interesting.

Shelly: –  Yeah, very interesting, because a website is very important for any brand, right the most important thing, marketing tool as well. So, considering your experience on data and technology, can you please tell us about how a well thought out data-driven marketing and MarTech stack can be a significant growth driver?

Renata: – Good question and I really thought a long time ago about it together with my colleagues and I think as a company we will only be successful if you connect all the data we are provided with and as a bank we operate with a lot of data, as you know. So, my vision for customer data will be that we always collect, where it’s allowed,  customer data and know before our customers what he or she needs or wants tomorrow. Only in this way can we make the right offer at the right time on the channel that is relevant for the customer. This is not just about addressing customers because the development of our services and products can also be driven forward in this way. Only if we know what our customers and pProspects want from us will we be successful in general accordingly, I’m sure it’s right. At the same time we live in an increasingly fast-moving world,  COVID, we have here in Europe a war, you name it, everything is moving faster and we don’t know what is expected of us tomorrow. In order to have the necessary time for this and to focus more on planning and strategy and to move forward, we must do everything we can to automate our processes which can be more standardized and automatically maken [phonetic] (0:06:16) . So only in this way can we make a proper use of our most internally valuable asset, it’s our colleagues.

Shelly: – What were the key lessons from that? So, I know it sounds very easy, but there should be a lot of stuff going on in the background, so what were the key learnings?

Renata: – It’s not easy and we are learning every day, we are not at the end of, for now. So, my experience is that it’s almost about the same as [inaudible] (0:06:45). First of all, we still have too much data that is in different silos and cannot be connected with each other so easily, so we have to take great action here in order to create and implement the office and approaches for our customers and interested parties as early as possible. So, we need to focus more on this to connect our data and to make it more, I think, to more  easily use it, not only as a data nerd or a data technologist or data analyst but also as a business owner to use the data in a better way, in an easier way.

The second one is you can have a great idea on your own but you should always get experts and supporters to help you to implement it. Involving colleagues from other businesses, from other divisions early on creates a broad view on the issues and the topic and it is also much more fun if you don’t have to fight for the topic alone, but you have some stakeholders around you which will help you through it. It’s not even easy. And as you said marketing technology and marketing tech stack, I think the last one is the number of possibilities to build a good marketing tech stack is endless. I think the landscape of marketing tech tools increases from year to year. I think we have now 9832 possibilities to make some tools and marketing tactics, so it’s simply impossible to keep an overview, especially if you are not a technologist who specializes in it. In our organization we learned to think about use cases in the first step, so it’s not the tool that is selected, but rather we look for the setup that is the best or that can best support us based on the relevant use cases and not about is it the tool from this or that vendor, but how does it fit with our technology, how does it fit with our data strategy and how it does it support us to make the best use case of it.

Shelly: – Yeah, that’s right. So, do you have an example in your past of how data brought efficiency in your marketing plan that you could share with us?

Renata: – I think there are several examples but the last one in the last year it’s the freshest one, so I think I would choose this one. Last year we had a campaign. We ran a campaign for our campaign Deutsche Bank, the content was investment, part of the investment topic of which we are all convinced. We hit the nerve of the time. So, we’ve done the creation spot on, made the website, made the customer flow and in the following two weeks the data unfortunately showed us the opposite picture. The goals we had defined were not achieved. In the past we would have simply let the campaign continue due to the lack of numbers because we didn’t have the opportunity to see how it worked, this time thanks to the newly gained knowledge and also the technology we were able to react directly and to switch budget to another topic which was more efficient.

Shelly: – That sounds great. So, this must have been a new situation for the whole marketing team so how did they react to that and what was the best way to handle the reaction?

Renata: – You can imagine, it wasn’t easy for our marketers and also not for us because the first thing when you come with a report and say okay the data is saying it’s not working, the first thing you are asked is the data correct because no one is listening to the report. The topic always worked and why not now, I think the data is not right or the technology is not properly implemented. So we started in a direct marketing centre to take all the stakeholders, marketers, business owners, product managers, media specialists and also data analysts together in one room every week, the first 30 minutes of the day to see okay how is the data working, what does the media agency said, how does the website working, which leads can we generate, which were the relevant topics, which topics doesn’t fit in this goal, in this achievement. So, we spoke with each other, so we have to talk to you – you have to talk to your colleagues. I think the proof is that data and technology, is first and foremost, a people’s business you have to talk to each other to stay calm, not to take the questions personally because they only want to understand what is going on and you can’t go further and take, okay it’s so, and you have to do it but you have to analyze it and also discuss it with each other.

Shelly: – So, Renata tells us about any recent campaign which you saw in your country which inspired you, which was a great campaign and brought lots of results as well?

Renata: – I think it’s depending on the holidays now, we had Christmas some days ago. So, I saw a campaign from Audi, from our car brand Audi here in Germany and it was interesting to see they made a campaign, brand campaign fully on a concept car. It’s a car which doesn’t exist now, it’s only a concept, they have I think a prototype, I don’t know for it all, I didn’t have the opportunity to speak with the responsible manager for now, but it was interesting to see Santa Claus sitting in skies there and take not Rudy, the rednosed reindeer, but the new Audi car fully electric fully charged to make the wishes true and he’s in a Gray suit and not almost seeing or depending that they didn’t expect its Santa Claus till you see the envelope where the wishes from the children are there. So, he’s sitting there taking his car to the world and leaving reindeers over there with his new Audi. So what’s so cute about it and also so inspiring is that the main campaign which was also here on TV, not only online with a concept, not with a product you can achieve and a product you can buy, but only for a concept which will be the future of which is the inspiration of future from Audi about new cars or to implement new cars. I think it works for cars for now because electricity, cars, environmental changes, it’s surely a topic on which everything runs here in Europe, I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here in Europe it’s a focused topic. But interesting to see if it’s a possibility also for financial institutions. For example, I have to think about it, but to explain to the customer we have a brand which is taking forward the future and not the current situation but what will be the next two three steps, interesting, didn’t expect it. It was really nice to see.

Shelly: – Wow. creating that excitement about what’s coming, what’s the new technology, you know, how you can change the world, how you can, you know, take care of the environment and it’s great because I’m sure that this must have been talk of the town, right, during the holidays?

Renata: – Yes, yes and during the holidays to connect the holidays and the time snow, reindeer, Santa Claus with the so inspirational and future topic. Good done.

Shelly: – Yeah, that’s right. So, looking at the future, what are the top three local and global trends you see in, you know, nowadays?

Renata: – Good question. I think the first one will be as I said now in the campaign measure it or forget it, sounds drastic but it’s true. If you can’t measure something and take the data to analyse the campaign or the implementation of a product, it’s not working anymore. The focus on data-driven decision making will become even more embedded in markets DNA and also in a financial institution DNA. I think in product management and project management we have to work on it and to make more data-driven decision making on it.

What is also the topic, now it will be I think in the next years for sure is customer centricity, it’s a powerful tool because aligning everything with the customer, with their needs, their voice and learning from it will be even more important than it already was because we are all companies not alone, not outstanding, we have a USP which must be more in the near of our customer needs. And we have to learn and to hear about what the customer needs and to implement new products and services on the base of it. And as we said we have a lack of capacity in times of scarce capacity, I think resource management and planning tools will play a much bigger role in the next few years than it was before.

Shelly: – Okay, well, that sounds interesting. This brings us to our last segment. So, what passion do you follow other than your work to unwind and also get inspired?

Renata: – Oh, it’s easy to inspire me. So, I’m a big fan of thinking out of the box. I look around who surprised me or my friends with contextual ads. Wow, is it working or is it not working on me or my friends. How others use data to uplift the brand positioning or to make a good proposal for a new product, for example. I think Amazon, they knew everything about me and they directly knew what I needed for the next one. So, these are really good guys working on it to use the data and also to how technology helped others to automate the processes. I think the opportunity to get inspiration is also a podcast like we are now producing and also a wide network to different companies. So not only in financial institutions but also to make a network with Amazon, with media agencies, with Google for example and to learn about them how they view on topics like data democracy and usage. These are my inspiration and my vision is to build a better environment for our clients and our colleagues and these are helpful products, useful services and efficient processes. So, you have to go a little bit broader and wider to see what the others are doing and learn from them. And I think the most important thing is inspiration by other people, it’s always about people, I learned it in the last 28 years so passion on what we do and what we get is the most inspiring thing and it helps me every day to see new perspectives on topic which I meant, okay it’s old but it’s not.

Shelly: – That sounds great. So how can our viewers contact you and reach out to you and connect with you?

Renata: – I think the easiest way will be through LinkedIn. I set up media management here at Deutsche Bank so I know social media. So, my profile on LinkedIn also addresses me, take the opportunity and connect with me, I will be happy to share my inspiration with you.

Shelly: – Wow, that’s great, Thank you so much, Renata, for the time today and it was great talking to you.

Renata: – You’re welcome, Shelly, thank you.

Shelly: – To all our viewers, thanks for listening and please subscribe to this channel. If you enjoyed this episode and you like to help and support this podcast, please share it with your friends, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. I’ll see you next time in a new episode with a new speaker. Till then peace.