Marketers today have access to incredible amounts of data, the trick is knowing what to do with it.
The basic objectives of marketing are clear enough – generate value for your customers and receive value from them as part of an ongoing relationship. Or put another way, it’s about building meaningful engagement as the platform for influencing the customer at every stage of the buying cycle.
These are important considerations if you're looking to move beyond traditional ‘spray and pray’ mass communications. But while online technology gives us the tools to become ever more personal with our marketing, the rapid adoption of that technology continues to shape evolving customer behaviour.
And while that seems like a match made in heaven, all too often the theory doesn't match the reality. So what's holding marketing back?
Looking 'beyond the click'
We have extensive tools for tracking customer behaviour, but for the most part, we're not making best use of them. A recent survey (Eloqua) established that most content marketers (certainly for companies with less than £1m annual budgets) do not track 'beyond the click' data.
The growing number of digital channels typically means organisations are awash with customer insights (what they’re browsing and buying) even if these are held in different, isolated pockets. The challenge is to make sense of it and deliver actionable recommendations.
There are plenty of options available, but the trouble is that there are too many for a single solution to cope effectively. While 53% of organisations plan to make greater use of real-time data (InfoGroup and Yesmail Interactive), 35% said that ‘integrating data’ was a barrier to implementing marketing automation (Econsultancy and Adestra) and 31% rarely optimise their targeting and messaging across channels.
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The true solution therefore lies a little deeper in the form of the ‘D-word’ – data. Maybe not the sexier side to relationship marketing, but critical nonetheless. As with technology, one size does not fit all – simply dumping all your customer data into one pot will not lead to a unified customer experience.
The single customer view
Marketers are already focusing their attention on social media, with 50% seeing it as their greatest opportunity for next year, followed by email (43%) and the web (35%) (Econsultancy and Responsys).
But the key is to integrate information from all sources to create a single customer view and make it available wherever and whenever it's needed.
Ask any one of the larger IT players and they’ll talk revolution – all singing and dancing marketing clouds that look to bring channels together in search of ‘synergy’. In reality however they actually mean evolution, and the continued combination of existing technologies – tools created for different purposes and different times.
CRM for example is predominantly focused on sales, while existing approaches to single customer view are more concerned with billing than customer experience.
In other words, they weren’t constructed to solve today’s challenges. In addition, any new capabilities are only added incrementally as customers build critical mass around new devices and channels – all of which requires new capabilities to be added to the marketer’s technology portfolio.
But marketers need to go further, and embrace the idea of an open platform. They need customer profiles to sit at the heart of a data ecosystem that integrates with any number of leading marketing, social media and productivity apps.
That means creating a single customer view that brings together fragments from any number of data silos to build powerful profiles for understanding customer behaviour. This can then be enriched with additional behaviour information to create rich, dynamic profiles that automatically update in real time. By feeding this profile data into existing marketing echnologies you can stimulate highly interactive and personalised conversations across all channels, domains and devices.
Customer data management
The key is customer data management (CDM). But let’s be clear: CRM, transaction histories, social and mobile solutions, data warehouses, and analytics platforms are by themselves not CDM solutions – though they do represent important components. Instead, CDM brings these information ‘pots’ together into a coherent, self-service platform for ALL business functions.
Behind any CDM initiative must be the need for fast access to accurate, real-time customer data, both now and in the future. Equally, it’s about removing silos and sharing this intelligence generously with all those who need it – the true democratisation of information.
In part, this is big data territory. Experience suggests that the focus here has to date been on using big data to report, analyse and graph behaviour. But such a focus has not joined this insight with the real-time view of how consumers interact with brands. Insight doesn’t equal action.
Consumers want to be talked to and have a discussion – not just listen to what brands have to say. In a way this forms a tacit agreement: in exchange for their personal information you’ll send them only messages that reflect their behaviours and interests. This is the end point in the journey toward marketing hero – data driven campaigns proven to stimulate a greater level of interaction with customers, regardless of channel.
The tools are already there to gather essential information about your customers, but the smartest marketers are finding ways to bring the data together to deliver the best possible results.
By Andy Walker, Innometrics.
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