To begin with... put your audiences first.
Why? Because the digital world thinks audience first, not media first. Grouping online audiences by demographic produces very narrow targets that do not necessarily represent a brand's most productive audience. We call potential consumers who do not fit a rigid demographic profile "valuable wastage."
People-Based MarTech relies on people-based targeting, replacing the need for and far exceeding the power of cookie-based data. Brands unlock a singular view of consumers, one that anchors all of the data discussed to a single email address.
From email marketing to automation, data analytics and innovative uses of artificial intelligence, marketing technologies are helping brands become stronger by engaging and communicating with their target audience on a whole new level.
Marketing and communications are in a rapid pace of ongoing transformation. The ability to track media, channel, and device consumption has never been greater. Marketers can now track and identify consumers across some offline and nearly all online behavior. They key to all of this? Marketing data. The immense amount of data available to marketers is growing more and more useful in the digital age. As marketing decisions become more complex and with shorter horizons, big data and other analytics capabilities become faster, more efficient, and more affordable for small businesses as well as enterprises. To help marketers make use of the data at their fingertips, we have broken down the various types of marketing data and how each can help your business.
Yes, there are many pure AI platforms.
But like big data platforms or cloud computing, most of them are general purpose technologies simply being harnessed in the service of marketing — often under the cover of a more marketing-specific application.
Hint: Linking relevant data points is the key.
According to an Econsultancy and Adobe survey of client-side marketers worldwide, 65% of respondents said improving their data analysis is a very important factor in delivering a better customer experience. That was the most popular answer for the second year in a row, up from 63% in 2017.
Today's modern marketer has to seek out every opportunity to learn new ways to engage consumers. In this case, Agile isn’t meant to be a synonym for nimble, but it may include project management elements that let modern marketing organizations act in a way that is more consistent with how businesses have changed in the 21st Century.
Sound the death knell...
There is some truth in all of these statements. But, none of these statements reflects the true state of marketing.
This week, I delivered a keynote at the Hewlett Packard (HP) Innovation Center in San Diego, California. The title of my presentation was “Data, Disruption and Decisions. Reinventing the way people, machines and insights work together.” One of the main topics of the presentation was “A New Digital Marketing Channel. Direct Mail.” Direct mail, new? Digital? Isn’t direct mail a 20th century analog channel?
Modern marketing is nothing like the practice of marketing just a few years ago. It’s more data-driven, focused and relevant. Digital marketers have had the ability to use variable data in email, landing pages and websites for years. It was a little harder for direct mail to have same level of relevancy and focus. Toner-based solutions (laser printers) also enable variable data printing. But direct mail produced on toner-based systems is slow, expensive and has limited formats.