3 Fixes to Future-Proof Your Marketing Operations: How Lenders Can Turn Slowdowns into Speed-ups

Highlights: 

• Marketing operations can be optimized by addressing blind spots through access to and experimentation with comprehensive data sources in a unified cloud environment.

• Outdated analytical strategies hinder campaign performance; modernizing them with integrated access to current attributes, datasets, and scores can improve targeting precision.

• Slow model builds can be accelerated by collaborating within a single, cohesive cloud environment that streamlines data, analytics tools, and strategies, reducing time to market significantly.

As a marketer, you work hard to connect the right offers with the right audiences through the most streamlined experiences. It’s how you attract and win new business. 

But, what about internally? Can you say the same for your marketing operations? Are the same old process bottlenecks slowing down production, or making it difficult to reach the right audiences and get your campaigns to market on time? If so, that’s a costly drain on your resources, campaign performance, and, ultimately, your bottom line. 
 

Keeping Pace With Today’s Market

Navigating the ever-changing economic landscape is a month-to-month situation for many borrowers. One week, they’re confidently spending and borrowing, and the next, they’re pulling back, as today’s unprecedented economic issues continue to unfold in real-time. 

Knowing this, it’s critical that you’re able to quickly adapt your prospecting strategies. Here’s how to correct common bottlenecks in your prospecting process and streamline your marketing operations for “always optimized” campaign performance. 

Problem 1: Blind spots

Let’s say you have a marketing strategy planned for the next quarter. But a sudden economic shockwave upends your plan. Your initially successful offer is now falling flat. Or your carefully targeted audiences are not responding. 

What now? If you’re unable to experiment with data sets, how can you know if changing your prospecting criteria will help or hurt your performance? These data “blind spots” are the elephant in the room, especially for smaller lenders that lack dedicated marketing data analytics expertise or resources. 

The solution? Easily access and test multiple data sources, including highly predictive alternative data, within a unified data and analytics environment in the cloud that’s built for business users. No data science degree required.  

You need an all-inclusive environment that allows you to easily explore various data sets and visualize outcomes in real-time, thanks to a direct feedback loop. It’s like a control board where you can dial your data levers up or down until you get your desired outcome:  

• Access comprehensive data sources, including your data, Equifax data, and data from other third parties within a unified environment.

• Easily conduct what-if and champion-challenger tests. 

• See the impact of changing your criteria via an illustrated, visual interface. 

• Evaluate outcomes using a real-time data feedback loop to understand impacts on responses, conversions, and potential delinquencies. 

Problem 2: Outdated analytic strategies

Just as “know your customer” is essential for lenders, “know your prospects” is crucial for marketers. For example, if you’re using insufficient data, disjointed datasets, or outdated modeling techniques, you won’t have a solid understanding of prospects. In turn, your campaigns will likely target the wrong audiences. 

It's an easy-to-miss operational issue that can stifle your campaign performance. Instead, your strategies should be streamlined, hyper-current, and intentional. They should continually evolve and be powered by the most tailored, up-to-date data possible.  

The solution? Modernize your analytical strategies with integrated access to comprehensive attributes, datasets, and scores, all purpose-built to help identify and target your most responsive audiences with unmatched precision within the most comprehensive and up-to-date data and analytics tools available on the market: 

• Unlock and activate hundreds of exciting new consumer attributes.

• Access pre-built, high-performing data sets tailored for prospecting. 

• Develop a deeper, more actionable understanding of prospects by leveraging financial capacity data and alternative data sources.

• Identify and target prospects who are “in market” for new credit at the right moments.

Problem 3: Slow model builds

It's said that a new car starts losing its value the minute you drive it off the lot. Analytical models are sort of like that. 

It can take months to build a new prospecting model or update an existing one, given the extensive data preparation and the back-and-forth between stakeholders, functional teams, and analytical environments. Meanwhile, markets and consumer behavior are constantly evolving. Every day, week, or month it takes to get a model to market, the criteria used to build it becomes increasingly outdated and, often, less effective. 

The solution? Get analytical models to market in under 30 days by collaborating within a single, cohesive environment where all elements—data, analytics tools, machine technology, and strategies—are continuously updated and connected in the cloud. 

Eliminate operational inefficiencies and redundancies by providing a shared data and analytics ecosystem that enables agile and iterative model development. In turn, this significantly shrinks production timelines by weeks or even months, allowing you to bring models to market in record time. 

• Easily build a single “source of truth” with centrally managed data that’s shared, accessible across the organization. 

• Further accelerate development with pre-built dashboards, pre-defined models, and custom modeling options. 

• Seamlessly deploy models (no recoding required) into an integrated decisioning hub or third-party platform of your choice.

Whether it’s reacting to sudden economic shifts, retargeting audiences in real-time, or getting models to market faster, the ability to act with speed and precision is what sets successful campaigns apart. Equifax can help you remove common barriers that slow you down, giving you powerful data, simplified tools, and an agile cloud-based environment to keep your marketing operations always optimized and future-ready. 
Turn your marketing into measurable results–faster than ever–with the Equifax Ignite dashboard.