Successful marketing depends on recognising, in real time, that “Jane” who researched your brand on her smartphone is the same Jane who comparison-shopped on her laptop and is now browsing on her tablet or in your store – and using that information to deliver timely, relevant content to whatever device she’s using at the time. This is the marketing holy grail of “right person, right message, right place, right time,” and it takes more than just being data-driven. It means implementing real-time, people-based marketing.
The good news is that technology is taking this from a marketing vision to marketing reality. However, advertisers and publishers still face massive challenges around customer recognition, speed, and scale.
Read on for approaches to drive a stake through the heart of these problem areas this Halloween – and all year round.
1. Take a peek behind customers’ masks
Building a view of your customers across all channels is where the new marketing battleground is fought and won. It’s what allows brands to deliver content and messaging that is timely, relevant, and personalised, earning loyal audiences and converting shoppers into buyers.
But most companies miss online cues or can’t identify their customers fast enough. As a result, they lose the opportunity to engage consumers in the critical moments when they’re most likely to make a sale. Not only do customers get spooked by ads for products and services they bought weeks ago; the money you’re wasting by targeting them long after their decision was made can be seriously scary.
Marketers need to be able reach people at the right time – often, the instant they’re searching for something specific online. This doesn’t mean chasing cookies, relying on batched processes, or guessing at what customers want. Instead, you need to take a closer look at your first-party data and effectively merge it across devices and channels for a clearer view of the customer.
2. Don’t get lost in a data maze
The process of recognising the consumer is further complicated by the large and ever-growing suite of technologies that publishers and advertisers rely on to support the aggregation, onboarding, management, and deployment of customer data. According to research from Signal and the Winterberry Group, brands now employ upwards of 12 different tools to collect and manage their data. This makes it tough for marketers to recognise today’s multiscreen consumers and reach them with the timely, personalised content they have come to expect.
The ability to continuously identify and understand customers, all the time, no matter the touchpoint, and aggregate those fragmented interactions into one view of identity is critical for marketers’ ability to see the whole customer journey, not just a few slices of it. To achieve this, marketers need a persistent identifier for every customer that provides a complete view of the journey across channels, and lasts the lifetime of the customer.
3. Escape worrisome walled gardens
While the rise of Facebook and Google offers a range of opportunities to marketers, they don’t come without challenges. Companies are turning to these ‘walled garden’ platforms to scale their first party data, but in reality marketers are only getting narrow campaign-centric metrics in return. Brands don’t receive the customer insights they need to close the loop on their analytics or develop rich profiles of their customers that help them provide better experiences.
An emerging alternative to walled gardens is data sharing. Publishers and/or advertisers can form a cooperative identity network with trusted partners to share anonymised data in a secure and privacy-compliant way. Data sharing allows companies to work together to better match the scale of walled gardens, providing a more complete picture of their customers without having to surrender control of their data.
If companies can take these three tips under their belt, Halloween doesn’t have to be the annual trick that haunts a marketer’s calendar. It can be the treat which boosts their bottom line.
By Neil Joyce, MD for Signal in EMEA.
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