A Marketing lecturer at Covenant University, Dr. Aderemi Victor Ademilua, has urged marketers and businesses to move beyond collecting customer data and focus on converting insights derived from such data into measurable revenue.
Ademilua, who is also the founder of 1603 Media Consulting Limited and Demil Realties Limited, made the call in a presentation titled “Data-Driven Marketing: Turning Insights into Revenue” at a webinar organised by the National Institute of Marketing Nigeria (NIMN).
He said data-driven marketing had become central to business growth, noting that organisations could no longer afford to treat customer information merely as a tool for preparing marketing reports and dashboards.
Drawing from a survey of 33 marketing professionals, Ademilua said 96.7 per cent of respondents rated data-driven marketing as either “very” or “extremely” important to their businesses.
He added that 96.9 per cent of respondents reported at least moderate revenue improvement from data-driven marketing, while 90.9 per cent said they used marketing analytics often or always.
However, he identified poor data quality as a major barrier preventing businesses from fully benefiting from customer information, with 30.3 per cent of respondents citing it as the leading obstacle to extracting value from data.
According to him, inaccurate, incomplete or fragmented data could generate faulty insights and ultimately result in poor business and marketing decisions. “Garbage in, garbage out,” he cautioned, urging organisations to invest in data accuracy, integration, privacy, security and cleansing.
Ademilua said the growing importance of data meant that it should increasingly influence strategic decisions at the boardroom level rather than being restricted to measuring the performance of past marketing campaigns. He noted that “data has moved from the marketing dashboard to the boardroom.”
The marketing scholar also identified personalised marketing as a major but underexploited source of revenue, noting that 39.4 per cent of respondents in his survey considered it the strongest source of return on investment.
He urged marketers to deploy customer segmentation, behavioural data and predictive analytics to deliver the right messages and offers to the right customers at the right time.
According to Ademilua, the growing use of marketing analytics also demonstrates that intuition alone is no longer sufficient for businesses seeking to compete effectively in an increasingly data-driven marketplace.
“Analytics is becoming the engine of marketing performance,” he said, noting that the 90.9 per cent adoption rate in the survey reflected the increasing reliance on analytics in marketing decisions.
He advised marketers to make revenue the “North Star” of marketing analytics by moving beyond conventional indicators such as impressions, clicks and engagement to paying greater attention to conversion rates, customer lifetime value, customer retention, acquisition costs and the direct revenue contribution of marketing activities.
The Covenant University lecturer further called for the development of AI-ready marketing teams capable of combining human creativity, data intelligence and artificial intelligence.
He said marketers should not regard AI merely as an automation tool, but as a technology capable of reshaping the entire marketing value chain. According to him, 54.5 per cent of respondents expected AI to have the greatest impact on marketing over the next five years.
“AI is set to reshape the marketing value chain,” he said, while urging marketers to develop the skills and technological infrastructure required to effectively deploy AI and data.
Ademilua also advocated the establishment of a continuous “Data-Insight-Action-Revenue” system through which businesses collect data, generate insights, activate campaigns, measure results and use the outcomes to improve subsequent decisions.
He said such a system would enable brands to continuously learn from customer behaviour rather than treating individual marketing campaigns as isolated activities.
According to him, effective segmentation and personalisation could improve conversion rates and average revenue per user, while predictive churn analytics could help identify customers at risk of leaving and enable businesses to implement proactive retention campaigns.
Ademilua also highlighted the use of AI-powered customer experience tools, including Zigi Voice Assistant on the MyMTN Nigeria app, noting that the technology enables prompt and efficient resolution of customer issues, which in turn creates opportunities for customer retention and cross-selling.
According to him, the ultimate goal should be to create a system where data informs decisions, decisions drive action and marketing actions produce measurable revenue.
He said brands that would remain competitive in the emerging marketing environment would be those capable of continuously learning from their customers and converting such insights into timely, personalised and commercially effective interventions.
