With the explosion of data and technologies, the opportunity for marketers to deliver optimal consumer experiences via tailored messaging across channels and devices has never been greater. Yet capitalizing on this opportunity remains a key challenge. According to Experian’s 2016 Digital Marketing Report, 56% of C-level executives cite orchestrating cross-channel interactions as a top priority, with another 33% citing delivering relevant and contextual content as a top challenge.
Challenges arise when the data that can be used to inform and advance marketing and advertising efforts is scattered across multiple, siloed systems and analyzed using outdated measurement techniques. Without the ability to understand who your customers and prospects are and the channels, devices and tactics that are most effective in converting them, you can’t deliver tailored messages and experiences that meet their unique needs and preferences.
To overcome these challenges, marketers need the ability to analyze the attributes of their customers and prospects in combination with tactical marketing performance. Here are some key people-based strategies that marketers can employ to enhance the consumer experience and deliver on the promise of right person, right place, right time and right message:
Understand Consumer Attributes, Preferences and Behaviors
The path to conversion isn’t straight and narrow. The typical consumer journey now weaves through a maze of online and offline touchpoints – from mobile devices and desktops, to call centers, stores and more. When these digital and physical interactions can’t be linked back to a consumer at the individual level, problems arise. Not only is the consumer experience disjointed, but the ability to target customers and prospects at every stage of their journey becomes compromised.
To deliver the coordinated experiences that consumers expect, marketers need a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their customers and prospects, their preferences and what drives their behaviors. To create this single view, marketers must link cross-device data with first-, second- and third-party data assets from disparate marketing and advertising systems. This process, known as people-based identification, de-duplicates unique users across multiple devices and synchronizes it with deep demographic, transactional and behavioral insight to create robust consumer profiles. Marketers can then use these profiles to buy media that is performing best for specific audiences, and facilitate relevant experiences across all interactions.
Implement Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) Measurement
While understanding individuals, their attributes and their behaviors is a critical first step for enhancing the consumer experience, it’s only half the equation. Just because you’ve identified an individual and their attributes doesn’t mean you know which channels and granular-level tactics (creative, offer, imagery, etc.) will drive a conversion, sale, repeat purchase or other given success metric. Only when these enriched profiles are integrated with multi-touch attribution do marketers receive an unparalleled view of marketing and advertising performance by audience segment. By providing visibility into which channels and tactics influence a specific audience, when and to what extent, marketers can effectively optimize their paid media budgets across consumer touchpoints while delivering coordinated messages and experiences that drive results.
Audience + Attribution = Actionable Marketing Intelligence
Marketers need a new kind of marketing intelligence if they want to drive meaningful results in today’s consumer-led, multi-screen world. With experience fast becoming the new competitive battleground, marketers must continually work to make their messages as relevant and meaningful as possible, regardless of channel or device. Only when audience and measurement intersect, ideally within a single platform, will marketers get the actionable intelligence they need to reach specific audiences, in the right place, at the right time and with the right message—and with greater accuracy than ever before.
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