Tag: data-driven

Digital Marketing Challenges Are you new to digital marketing? If you answered yes, then you may already know this is a complex world made up of cookies, pixels, attribution, and unique KPIs. With nearly 10 years of advertising experience, Experian is familiar with the challenges advertisers face as they prepare for their first digital marketing campaign. Those challenges include: determining a target audience, justifying data fees for targeting, sending a consistent message to every channel and measuring the success of a campaign. Of these challenges, creating an accurate, data-driven target audience and understanding the attribution process are the two most common. Coincidentally, these two challenges tend to be the most difficult to overcome and have the highest impact on a campaign’s success.  1.) Creating an accurate, data-driven target audience Understanding the basic demographics of your customer is the first step in the audience creation process. Your next step should be to understand your customers’ lifestyles, purchase behaviors, and current interests. By truly knowing your customer, you are then able to build out a multi-channel targeting strategy comprehensive of not only basic demographics and past behavioral data, but current behavioral trends that lead to individuals who are in market for a product or service. This reduces irrelevant marketing to individuals who may have the demographic characteristics, but are not yet in market. Overall, creating a relevant target audience saves media spend by focusing on targeting tactics that have a higher potential for success.  2.) Understanding the attribution process Now that you have your target audience, you need to determine how to measure the success of your campaign. Is your goal to increase online purchases? Drive store visits? Or, do you want your overall revenue to grow by a certain amount? Before launching your campaign, make sure you have a clear goal as well as a plan for measuring whether or not you meet your goal. Most digital marketers will judge the success of a campaign by online events, such as site visits, form completions, or online purchases. However, you may also want to measure offline metrics like phone calls or in person visits to a brick and mortar store. Offline metrics are essential to campaign performance, but are frequently over looked. Experian’s OmniActivation Strategic Services recommends having one clear goal that can be accurately measured. This ensures your campaign’s target audience and optimizations support the metric that will ultimately determine the success of your campaign.

Customer data is the core and foundation of any strategic efforts to retain and grow customer relationships.  Whether that be through retail sales, account expansion, increased subscriber engagement, or increased giving in a non-profit setting, the need to know and understand your customers has never been greater.  Yet, where is YOUR data?  The acronyms abound. CRM, DMP, AMP, ESP, SMP, not to mention the ubiquitous marketing clouds.  The possibilities seem endless.  Many of these acronyms have brought new promises to understand, reach, and engage with consumers, whether they be your existing customers or new prospects.  With each new channel has brought with it a whole new ecosystem, new data to understand and integrate, and yet another piece of a growing technology stack.  And certainly, these are useful and necessary additions for many marketers. But how well do they deliver fully on their visions of commonly promoted themes?  How good is your “single customer view”?  How “holistic” are your insights?  How well are you able to “seamlessly understand your customers in offline and online channels”?  You probably still have concerns.  In the rush to amass cookies, to increase email capture rates, and to deliver SMS messaging, we have often left offline behind.  We’ve built up large pools of digital data, yet our insights remain one-dimensional.  To get past this, we have to take a long hard look at where our data lives and how it’s managed. To get started ask yourself a few questions: Are you truly connecting and aggregating your online and offline data to create multi-dimensional understanding of your customers? Are you doing this in a way that leverages your core PII (your “CRM” data) attributes along with online anonymous data (in a privacy compliant manner, of course)? Are you able to quickly create audiences that are deployed into coordinated campaigns, and to generate lookalike prospects all at the same time?  Can all of this be done by a non-technical member of your marketing team using an intuitive web-based interface?  All in a cost-effective manner? If the answer to any of these are no, then talk to us.  We’ve created a solution that meets these needs called the Customer Data EngineTM.