According to Astro Teller, head of moonshots for Google X, “It is a lot easier to hit a 10x number improvement than a 10% improvement.” The reason for this is when you set your sights on small improvements you tend to look for incremental ways to improve rather than big ideas to reach toward the stars.

The concept can easily apply to marketing teams that adopt a 10x strategy to reach major growth objectives, and the rise of NoSQL and document databases helps marketers to deliver on that strategy.

In traditional marketing campaigns the time and effort required to access data and easily query it has been a major obstacle to success and has limited marketing creativity. The need for a data scientist or an IT manager to assist has also added to the burden.

With NoSQL databases, marketers have a new way to easily access data and unlock marketing creativity to get a multiplicative level of improvement instead of incremental improvement. NoSQL document databases offer more flexibility in accessing all data types, cost savings by reducing the overhead and expense of data wrangling, and allow marketers to scale and grow their efforts more quickly and easily.

Following are a few ideas of how marketers can now utilize customer data to uncover the art of the possible:

• A picture says a thousand words:  We all know that messaging isn’t the only reason people click or engage with marketing campaigns. Often there are beautiful images or videos along with the campaigns, but it is hard to measure the impact of images on customer engagement. With a NoSQL document database, image content becomes searchable by engagement: who bought what, when, where and with that you can pull together a timeline of highly effective customer images. This allows for smarter and more contextual retargeting strategies in digital and traditional channels. With this capability you always can bring forward each customer’s favorite image to help boost conversions and drive revenue.
• Turn your frown upside down:  A bad customer experience doesn’t have to be the end of the customer journey. What if it was possible for you to run a marketing retention campaign more quickly and efficiently for people who returned items and had a bad experience? The ability to access product information in a timely manner from a NoSQL document database means that your marketing team can easily find and target all the people that have faced certain challenges with a product or didn’t connect with the messaging. You could also re-engage with customers who have return items or stopped services.
• Data defines you: Data is one of the most powerful assets for today’s business and the ability to derive insights from customer data is what differentiates market offerings. Metadata has long been important for indexing and ranking, but there is marketing potential in metadata as well. With NoSQL document databases, you can simplify and reduce the time it takes to create audiences based on buying trends and metadata tags associated with them versus segmentation based on traditional age, gender, and affiliation demographics. Campaign development on similar metatags would be a simple process and could have potential to reach segments with much higher engagement and conversion rates.

These are just a few examples of what is possible with the right tools. By enabling marketers with a new level of connectivity and access to data you unlock the potential of the data. Furthermore, with a NoSQL document database such as MongoDB or Cosmos DB, all this information lives in one place. Then the question becomes more about how you encourage your team to embrace the art of the possible and think more creatively around the data and the customer journey.