According to market intelligence company, IDC, in 2018 the world reached 18 zettabytes of data. IDC predicts that the world’s data will grow to 175 zettabytes in 2025. There is no question that data has become one of the hottest commodities. Many experts even claim that it has become the new oil.
When it comes to marketing, today’s brands have data coming at them in all different shapes and sizes, including: behavioral data, such as how often consumers visit your website; demographics, their geographic location; and purchase history including what they purchase and how much they spend. And this data is coming in from multiple devices and locations, including offline activity.
The challenge isn’t finding the data, it’s being able to manage the data, respect consumer privacy rights, and use it to make smarter advertising decisions and deliver intelligent interactions.
Here are three ways you use your data more wisely:
1. To identify and learn more about your customers
One of the most important and challenging objectives today is being able to properly identify your audiences. Data has made this easier because we can learn a lot more about customers—but sometimes it’s hard to keep up. The customer journey is no longer linear, today’s consumer is not necessarily making purchases from one device at one location. Instead, each transaction usually includes multiple touchpoints, thus creating a lot of fragmented information that is left to be pieced together. Brands who are successful in putting those pieces together will be able to better identify their customers and provide more personalized, relevant experiences.
2. To put an end to wasted marketing spend
What’s more important than the amount of data is the quality of data. You should start with your first-party data and assess what’s missing and what gaps need to be filled. From there, layer in third-party data from trusted, privacy-compliant data providers. Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it sounds, because information is often incomplete, spread out across multiple sources and difficult to manipulate to gain meaningful insight. In fact, according to a recent Experian study, one-third of organizations think that one of the biggest challenges in leveraging data to achieve top business initiatives is the lack of trust in that data. The same study found that 95 percent of organizations see negative impacts from poor data quality, including wasted ad dollars. If you can’t accurately leverage data to define your audience, you aren’t reaching the right consumers, and you’re wasting valuable marketing budget.
3. To measure campaign effectiveness
Above all else, marketing practitioners say insufficient data limits their ability to drive actionable attribution insights. At the end of the day, you need to be able to attribute sales to your marketing efforts. By making sure your data is managed correctly, you are giving yourself access to powerful insights that allow you to improve your marketing strategy and justify future marketing spend. By bringing offline and online transaction data together and measuring against campaign audience and impression data you can identify real sales impact.
The marketing ecosystem has dramatically changed, and the consumer must be at the heart of every marketing strategy. But to achieve this, marketers need to better understand the customer to provide them with the most relevant, personalized experiences possible. The combination of powerful data, along with activation and measurement technology, can help you create and execute effective campaigns that deliver results.
Join Experian at Advertising Week!
Next month, I will be moderating a panel during Advertising Week (Sept. 23-26) at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square in New York City:
Session: So much data…so little time, Moderated by Experian
Overview: Today’s brands have an endless amount of data on their customers including behavioral data such as how often they visit your website, demographics such as their geographic location, and purchase history such as what they purchase and how much they spend. Data comes in from multiple devices and locations, including off-line activity. Most brands are still struggling to manage all the data and use it to actually make smarter advertising decisions and deliver intelligent interactions. The panel will discuss how brands can know and communicate with their customers on a more personal level by unifying customer data on a centralized platform.
When: Monday, September 23 at 10:45am (subject to change)
Where: Culture Builders Stage
Also mark your calendar for this Advanced TV session with Experian and TiVo:
Session: The TV business is a data business – now things get interesting
Presenters: Brad Danaher, Director of TV Solutions from Experian and Walt Horstman, President of TiVo
When: Monday, September 23 at 3:30pm (subject to change)
Where: Entertainers Stage
Advertising Week is the premier event for marketing, brand, advertising, and technology professionals. Featuring top industry leaders, stars of the entertainment world and inspiring entrepreneurs, Advertising Week’s thought leadership program is designed to give professionals at any level career-enhancing insights, deep-dives into the industry’s most important topics and actionable learnings to bring back to the office. Click here for information about the event.