Christoph Urban – Deezer

Christoph Urban is the Marketing Director at the international music streaming service Deezer and responsible for all B2C marketing activities in the DACH region. The company was founded in France in August 2007 and has around 16 million monthly active users in more than 180 countries worldwide.

the most important KPIs FOR Growth

Lifetime Value and Top-of-Mind Awareness are some of the most important KPIs at Deezer. But many others differ depending on the division. Christoph Urban often needs to optimise many KPIs at the same time: “The art is to find the decisive KPI, especially in the area of performance marketing. With our subscription-based business model, lifetime value is one of the most important growth KPIs. How much money do I have to spend until I have a paying subscriber? How long does a subscriber stay with us? When it comes to brand growth, we generally work with classic market research KPIs. This includes top-of-mind awareness and unaided and aided brand awareness, but also Google search volumes and branded search in particular.”

“With our subscription-based business model, lifetime value is one of the most important growth KPIs. How much money do I have to spend until I have a paying subscriber? How long does a subscriber stay with us?“

DATA PLAYS A CENTRAL ROLE AT DEEZER

At Deezer, decisions are generally made based on data, shares Christoph Urban: “As a modern company with a digital background and a digital product that is only available online, we are already relatively advanced on the subject of DDDM. It’s our job, for example, to compile a personalised playlist and to recommend relevant content for the user using various data points. The more relevant these recommendations are, the more the user uses our streaming service and the longer he or she stays on our platform. All decisions that we make, especially in the marketing and the product area, must be based on data. It’s a process that requires discipline from everyone in the company. We have a team in France that is responsible for Business Intelligence & Data Analytics. They prepare the data and conduct analyses that we query, and we as the specialist department use them to make our business decisions. The tasks of this department also include the ongoing control and optimisation of all marketing measures.”

SETTING PRIORITIES IS AN ESSENTIAL SUCCESS FACTOR

For Christoph Urban, setting priorities is one of the most important success factors when working with data: “Our type of business allows us to measure everything. Because everything that happens in our app, or generally happens in apps, ends up in a database. In the end, you have a big mountain of data. To be able to recognise connections and to make relevant statements, one must first decide which KPIs are the most important ones. So, you have to set priorities. Another challenge is that the data comes from a wide variety of internal and external sources. Analysing and consolidating that data is not always easy because it is often not congruent, which means there is a certain level of inaccuracy.” Another success factor is the professional and technical expertise of the decision-makers, says Christoph Urban: “Data can only be as good as the people who make the decisions with it. It’s a process, and the marketing landscape and technologies are constantly changing. Which means you must stay on the ball and continue to educate yourself, professionally and technically.”

“Data can only be as good as the people who make the decisions with it. It’s a process, and the marketing landscape and technologies are constantly changing. Which means you must stay on the ball and continue to educate yourself, professionally and technically.”

Marketing and sales are growing more closely together

For Christoph Urban, all market participants will certainly collect data in the future. With marketing executives under increasing pressure to achieve results, digital marketing will become indispensable in the future. Also, sales and marketing will continue to grow more closely together: “Companies like Facebook & Google are increasingly dominating the market. The marketing and sales teams will therefore cooperate more closely with each other in the future, even working closely together with product development right from the start to implement business strategies together. The days of separately managed sales and marketing departments are numbered.”