Over the past couple of decades, the way businesses value, use, collect, and manage marketing data has changed considerably. What was once a resource reserved for the “number crunchers” of the world is now a critical skillset required for nearly every industry.
Marketers in particular have taken a more scientific approach to their efforts. Formerly a profession rooted in trial and error, marketing has become extraordinarily more precise and risk averse. Many even consider customer data to be more valuable than money.
While data can be viewed as a marketer’s biggest asset, it also remains a challenge.
Managing and interpreting data can be overwhelming as new laws emerge, customer expectations continue to rise, and disruption becomes the norm. To succeed, marketers need to be able to gather high-impact information on customers, while maintaining full control of their data and complete transparency into how it fits within the greater marketing landscape.
As CPRA and the privacy-first web continue to gain traction, organizations need to adapt. Customers demand transparency about the collection and use of their personal information. Planning now saves you fines and headaches in the future.
The collection of customer data is a never-ending process. With every single touchpoint a customer has with a company, an individual’s profile grows increasingly robust, and marketers are better equipped to target and engage. Today’s technology has the sophistication to pinpoint the context of a purchase and provide additional recommendations to help supplement and deepen every interaction.
One such example is technology that captures an image of an in-store shopper and provides personalized recommendations based off the shopper’s age and gender. If the shopper chooses to make the purchase as a result, that data is further captured and added to their unique profile. This is just one example of the emerging ways that marketers are gathering customer data.
More new technology that is helping compile a complete understanding of a customer is the data pulled from Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
With resources from wearables to intelligent home appliances, marketers are able to more completely understand a consumer’s lifestyle even when they are not actively shopping or engaging with a brand. They can pull everything from an individual’s perceived fitness level, to the number of times a household member opens the refrigerator to better target them with products and services that are in tune with their individual lifestyle.
These new methods of gathering customer data are providing marketers with more information than ever into the individual’s purchase history. They help to bridge the gap between deliberate customer engagements and create a complete profile of the customer’s needs and wants.
That said, the implications for data growth are exponential and it’s critical for marketers to be able to properly manage data and draw accurate insights.
Smart home AI presents tremendous opportunities for the utilities industry to capitalize on simplification of connectivity.
Because today’s consumers are entrusting brands with massive amounts of their personal information, it’s become increasingly important that personal data is handled with extra care. Recognizing the extent of information enterprises are privy to, new regulations like the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) are beginning to emerge and companies are being held accountable for how they manage and communicate the data they store on their customers.
Because the amount of data that companies handle is massive, it’s essential that marketers use built-in GDPR capabilities to ensure that all interactions and information is being responsibly managed. By properly organizing and storing information in real-time, they avoid the potential for hefty fines and last minute scrambles to prove transparency and responsible data handling.
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While it’s well understood that data plays an essential role in driving more meaningful interactions with customers, marketers are still mapping out the best way to quantify the actual impact. Because marketers are continuously executing across multiple channels, getting an accurate read on successes and failures can be time-consuming and often inaccurate.
With solutions like Spend Management for Digital Channels, Embedded Customer Attribution and the Digital Boardroom for the CMO, marketers are able to not only have full visibility into their marketing spend across channels, but understand how each effort impacts the greater organization and therefore prove their worth.
Sophisticated data analysis tools enable marketers with a comprehensive view of their efforts so that they can adjust and improve campaigns in real-time and within context of other efforts across the organization.
With deeper understanding into how efforts interact and impact one-another, marketers are able to become greater contributors to the success of an organization and dramatically increase their Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).
Consider global online superstore, Jet.com, a company that relies on attribution technology to gain a comprehensive view into spend across their marketing channels. With technology that helps them to attribute true credit to each of their marketing initiatives, they are able to become more deliberate and effective across all of their campaigns. As a result, they have touted that they are able to better deliver on their promise of smart and simple savings for their customers.
With data growing more immense and customer profiles increasingly sophisticated, the marketer’s opportunity for disruption is ripe. As marketers continue to harness data and grow their understanding of key audiences, new innovative ways to engage will emerge and industry will continue to grow increasingly personalized. By providing marketers with the tools they need to succeed, we usher in a new era of marketing and as a result a new period of data responsibility and transformation.
