Though data is what powers the insights and activities that induce meaningful customer involvement, most marketers don’t understand how to manage — less capitalise on — their data.
Now along comes large data. We’re not talking about a lot of information with big data; we’re talking about data in formats like real time click streams, geo information, social conversations, and images that don’t readily fit into conventional data formats. What are marketers supposed to do with that?
Well, if they are enterprising and want to take leaps ahead of their competition, they’ll satisfy the huge data chance head on and — in cooperation with the chief data officer or information architect at their business — they’ll learn everything they can about how to pull all their data together to a data lake. They might even dive into learning Hadoop — the tech that produces a data lake possible.
But this piece is not meant to be a primer about Hadoop. It is intended to help marketers understand what they need to do to take advantage of information — particularly big data — to help them build better dialogues with their customers.
Big info keeps you in measure
Today’s consumers control the conversation. They select the moment, the station, and the topic. Because of this, most companies are not in sync with their customers: they function at a different cadence. Operational inertia means they can not respond with the accuracy demanded. To be able to keep in sync, they need a modern marketing architecture that is data-driven and that facilitates response across stations in real time.
When companies respond in meaningful, timely, and channel-appropriate manners, consumers are usually willing to share much more data about themselves. With a modern advertising structure, companies are in a position to capture data from different sorts of channels and resources, derive insights from this information and quickly take relevant action.
The benefit is: better discussions, longer connections, and improved sales/loyalty.
But here is the issue: an organization can catch all kinds of data but not have the ability to use or monetize it. There are tons of companies with”dark data” — troves of data that’s sitting — untapped. And there is lots of new Big Data that firms have not yet started to mine. But with the technology available today, they could.
Big information can kick-start customer engagement
The reason it’s so important to understand big data is simple: it provides the key to unlocking new and important insights to who your customers are, where and when they interact with you personally, what they say about you, who else they speak to… and more. With this type of information, marketers can finally attain a strong, multi-dimensional profile of each person — and gain insights which can help initiate interactions that build sustaining involvement. With the right technology, they can do it quickly, placing them back into cadence with their client. Isn’t that what marketers desire?
Maybe not. Some look happy with the status quo.
But sticking to advertising’comfort food’ (batch and burst tactics) won’t get companies far. Neither is going to setting up separate social websites or inbound marketing programs, which might provide incremental increase, but aren’t scalable. Siloed efforts tie up data in separate systems, finally creating a disconnected view of their client. In this scenario, by way of instance, Sally’s negative experience expressed via Twitter and Facebook isn’t addressed in the email blast that is on its way for her inbox. Sally has shared her frustration with her big social network, and even when the company was tracking it, it is isolated information – buried at a silo. At best, she’ll dismiss the email. At worst, it will reinforce her negative impression of the business.
In order to harness the power of consumer data for a complete, unified perspective of their customer, marketers require a contemporary marketing and advertising solution that is capable of extracting, transforming and manipulating information from every station to make actionable insights for data-driven decisions.
An architecture for the modern marketer: Use this to start a dialogue with your CIO
Modern marketers require a framework that is made for the current omnichannel and information proliferating world. One that breaks down silos and cuts through the complexity of the fragmented advertising technology landscape: a super-connected environment that links together everything in the marketing ecosystem: data, insight and action.
The Modern Marketing Architecture starts with a data foundation that permits marketers to build rich, 360° client profiles by seamlessly linking together information from multiple internal databases, such as CRMs or ERPs, with unstructured,”Big Data” from sources like the internet and social websites. It’s built on a powerful data management platform that can quickly ingest, aggregate, cleanse, match and distill data from multiple data sources to resolve identities to a single record and generate one view of the customer, but one that is dynamic and changes over time as clients change. The system preserves all the detail from these sources in a granular level, so that entrepreneurs can segment — as well as micro-segment — their clients as they learn more about them over time.
The next component in the Modern Marketing Architecture is In-line analytics. Several organizations are harnessing Business Intelligence (BI) tools to analyze operational and transactional data to collect insights about their business. Similarly, they are exploring the potential of large information to obtain greater insights in their client world. From the Modern advertising Architecture, analytics are embedded as an inline process, so they occur in real time. Every interaction with a customer creates information that is fed back in the customer data environment to improve the profile and provide entrepreneurs improved insights into their clients’ tastes and behaviors. This remedy is designed to leverage machine learning and sophisticated algorithms to drive next-best offers and activities in response to all those tastes, creating hyper-personalized interactions.
The next component in the Modern Advertising Architecture is that the Linked Execution layer. This is where multiple communication channels are brought together into one point of operational management. This allows entrepreneurs to use a centralized console to construct out multi-channel engagement approaches that traverse all consumer touch points, such as email, internet, social, SMS, etc..
The Modern Marketing Architecture is powerful and transformative. By leveraging convergent technology that link customer information together with analytics, and enabling personalised interactions over multiple channels, the Modern Marketing Architecture allows marketers to fully embrace the opportunities offered in the modern era and beyond.
