Turn Customer Data Into Revenue, Don Urges Marketers

A lecturer of Marketing 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 while delivering a presentation titled “Data-Driven Marketing: Turning Insights into Revenue” at a webinar organized by the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN) in August 2026.

He said data-driven marketing had become central to business growth, noting that organizations 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 one of the major barriers 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 organizations 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. “Data has moved from the marketing dashboard to the boardroom,” he said.

The marketing scholar also identified personalised marketing as a major but under-exploited 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.

Ademilua said the growing use of marketing analytics also demonstrated that intuition alone was 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 recorded 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.

Instead, he said marketers should pay 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, 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.

Using MTN Nigeria as a case study, Ademilua demonstrated how customer data, segmentation, predictive analytics, AI and real-time personalization could be deployed at scale to generate commercial value.

He said the telecommunications company analyses millions of customer interactions, including call records, internet usage, recharge patterns, location information and app behaviour, to develop customer profiles and support targeted marketing.

According to him, effective segmentation and personalization 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.

He added that such interventions could reduce customer attrition, increase customer lifetime value and boost recurring revenue.

*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*

The lecturer further pointed to real-time campaign optimization as another benefit of data-driven marketing, explaining that live dashboards could enable marketers to adjust promotions and pricing while campaigns were still running.

He said this could reduce marketing waste and improve campaign returns by replacing guesswork with real-time decision-making.

Ademilua also cited location-based marketing as an application of customer data, saying geographic and mobility information could be used to deliver location-specific offers and services.

He said the MTN example demonstrated how businesses could transform customer data from a passive resource into a strategic asset capable of generating measurable commercial returns.

He therefore urged marketers and brands to become “insight-driven” rather than merely “data-rich”, stressing that collecting large volumes of information without the capacity to convert it into actionable insights would not necessarily translate into business growth.

He recommended that organizations strengthen their data governance systems, improve data quality and train marketing personnel to work effectively with emerging technologies.

He also called on brands to deepen the use of customer data to create personalized experiences while making privacy, security and responsible data management integral parts of their operations.

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, personalized and commercially effective interventions.