The Marketing Transformation: Data Mining to Effective Campaigns
Of the transformation that technology brings to industries, digitization is a reality for stakeholders across industries. It’s all about data, after all — be it big data, on your mobile, about performance, the results of your campaigns, how your product is doing, even data about how to track data. Today, we realize that a high-end capability to analyze date is imperative with companies.
Understandably, companies are fast realizing — as was predicted — the worth of mobile-first marketing, original visuals and video content, stories to own, real-time marketing, heightened need to personalize and exuding overall positivity to touch individual lives in this ever-changing, challenging environment.
On the Digital Marketing blog, Jeffrey Misenti, Chief Digital Officer for FOX News Channel and FOX Business Network, says that data such as “viewability, is to understand as much about the users' actions as possible because the advertiser and the creative are independently doing an awful lot of that as well… the first party data I collect from my own digital properties tells my story very well, and I believe this would be more useful to all parties involved. So, in order to protect my own data and make the digital insights meaningful, I need to get better at collecting my data from all aspects of our digital properties, including the interactions with the advertisements that are displayed there”.
Customers’ cravings for information today is nurtured by accessibility — just a click of the mouse takes them to the products they want to buy, gives them in-depth knowledge of the brands they can choose from, know about the experiences of other users of a product, seek advice if they feel the need, and then, decide on whether they should purchase.
In the wake of the ever-seeking and ever-changing customers, the marketer has a mine of data at his disposal.
Informed customers leave ever-changing behavioural footprints. With the advent of the online, a deeper understanding of the customers has emerged as one of the important needs of marketing today. The more you, as a marketer, know about your customers, the deeper will be your understanding of their needs and their choices. Thereon, personalization is the key to targeting customers to heighten engagement, and brand loyalty, and drive conversations.
The onus lies on you, as a marketer, to be able to integrate customer profiles and remain relevant. As you must attract them to your products and/or services, you need to keep track of where your customers go to, when they go, what type of device they use to be online, et al; thereafter, you must be in a position (have a seamless infrastructure in place) for deeper analyses of how people navigate the Web, spot the patterns and study them extremely well. This will aid you in segmenting the customer base into groups for closer, personalized targeting and engagement.
The mine of data also has room to predict the future, get insights for cross-channel use, and know the lives of the customers up close. You, thus, have an integrated customer profile ready to recycle into your marketing campaigns, thereby, striking a higher chord with the relevance your customers look out for. What is happening here really is a sync-up between the campaign management and analytics to monetize upon.
Why reinvent marketing in these ‘digital’ times
Post-economic slowdown, with the maximization mantra of just-that-much that resources, faster response to digital advertisements because of precision targeting online has caught the fancy of ad chiefs and CMOs alike. There is also the encouragement of a higher number of impressions that digital ads deliver to the target audience in a given period of time.
Additionally, there is the advantage of attaching online ads to offline sales impact which has seen a steady rise in the online ad spend in developed markets. According to a TechCrunch on the Strategy Analytics findings in the US market, 2015 digital spending will account for 28 percent or USD52.8 million of an estimate of nearly USD187 billion add spend. Growing at a rate of 13 percent this year, and up 2.5 percent on 2014’s share, digital remains the fastest-growing of any category, said the report.
eMarketer estimates that mobile Internet ad spending in China will continue to head north and is expected to almost double this year. The market researcher predicts spending on display and search ads delivered to mobile Internet-connected devices will reach USD13.98 billion this year, up from USD7.38 billion in 2014, and will account for 45 percent of all digital spending in the country; China will also account for 20 percent of global mobile internet ad spend.
India too will reflect the worldwide “digital high”. eMarketer pegs digital ad spending growth at 27.0 percent or 14.2 percent of the total ad spending in India. In another three years, a quarter of the total ad spend in India will be for digital, overtaking several significant digital heavyweights such as France, Spain, Italy and Brazil.
Spending on mobile Internet ads in India is set to double in 2015 and is slated to reach 50 percent of the total digital ad spend.
These are quite encouraging numbers for marketers to look closer. They must take stock of the need to reinvent themselves in this digital world. Take the case of social media and its success in attracting mobile advertising dollars. Facebook’s mobile advertising revenue jumped from 69 percent last year to 73 percent of the social network’s total ad revenue during the first three months of the current year. Twitter’s total ad revenue in the fourth quarter of 2014 was USD432 million of which 88 per cent was from mobile ads.
For marketers, innovation is the key to the huge repository of data called the customer base to unlock. Turning the wheels of the lock are services such as Adobe Marketing Cloud. Marketers require such a complete set of marketing solutions for deep insight into customers, the ability to build personalized campaigns and manage content and assets, and deliver data, insights, context, profiles and more.
There’s just too huge a movement online for marketers to not feel the opportunities to monetize. They need a solution that integrates workflow management, enables data sharing, and other critical services delivered via a unified interface. They need the focus on them, a solution suite that helps deliver amazing consumer experiences. They need a suite of enablers that casts an eye into the future too.
The magic of what Gartner recognizes as the leader of its Marketing Hubs Magic Quadrant — such, is the need.
