To succeed in the fast-paced digitalised marketplace, where millions of interactions take place every minute, you need to know how to communicate with individuals seamlessly and personally. To make that happen, organisations not only need to have relevant information available about the individuals they are trying to interact with, but also the ability to join together the multiple touch points and engagements to build a broader, more holistic picture of the people they are trying to reach.

Well-validated, traditional marketing processes, such as funnels and lead nurturing, rely on this idea as activity is tailored around an individual and the focus is on progressing the specific relationship that person has with the brand.

Recent research revealed that 32% of the UK of the population are ‘digital devotees’, a group which own multiple devices, spend the most time on-line and use digital services for the widest range of activities, while more than half use digital for practical day to day usage. This is a wide pool of people that have the potential to engage with a brand through many devices. But people don’t think in terms of channels. They see one brand and expect to have a consistent brand experience whatever device they’re using.

There are tools out there which are designed to help by providing a better analysis of digital marketing. However those tools, evolving as they have from more traditional marketing processes, still rely on a persistent identifier to track each individual. And this is where we get to the crux - no two channels or devices have the same identifier. To apply these tools, marketers need a link between all those identifiers. So, exactly how can marketers do this?

Declarative definition

First up is taking a declarative approach, where marketers require people to tell them what devices they own, typically via a login process. This option is straightforward to implement and is seen as a first-party solution, relying solely on the brand’s relationship with its consumers. However, it doesn’t come without its limitations, not least the work required to transmit this insight to external execution channels. Data must be taken from each log-in, mapped and merged into the CRM, and then transmitted out in a consistent manner.

Using a declarative match is a scientifically valid method of linking together devices. The primary constraint on its effectiveness is largely a question of scale. It is frequently the case that a brand will have a unique identifier for every device that has engaged with it but no way of connecting those together, or linking that device cluster further to a CRM System. This is because there are insufficient declarative links.

Fortunately, every engagement with a brand can be tracked and linked back to a device identifier; and every engagement produces a large amount of “long-tail” contextual and device-specific data which can be tied to that device ID. The reduced costs of storage and computer processing means it’s more feasible to store all of these data trails start to identify meaningful patterns in these long-tail attributes.

These patterns are comparable to a ‘truth set’ – a set of devices with known linkage clusters – enabling meaningful patterns to be established, together with a weighting to indicate their statistical significance. A brand can then start to link together devices that match above a certain threshold to cluster devices without relying on a declarative match.

In-channel solutions

The transmission of insight to an execution channel is a hurdle many marketers face. It therefore makes sense to ask whether or not it is possible to use an in-channel solution, or some aggregation of those.

To connect these channel-specific views together marketers need to link the identifiers used in those channels – the whole aim of the game. However, in this case those channels don’t provide even the long-tail data needed to do this. In short, these solutions are designed to live within those walled gardens and it’s those walled gardens who get the most benefit from them.

But the real sweet spot for marketers is combining these two aspects together to get the most effective and efficient solution. Consumers’ interaction with their devices is only going one way – they’ll access content across varying devices, and those marketers who want to keep the edge need to make sure they have a solid cross-device strategy in place to cater to this.

 

By Tom Blacksell, managing director of decision analytics and marketing services at Experian

 

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