Welcome to the Dove Direct Print and Marketing Blog. Today's post, "Data Driven Marketing Trumps Digital" unearths marketing forecasts for 2019. Without question, there's a bevy of 2019 marketing forecasts, and while all marketing things digital tend to take center stage, the new boss in town is data driven marketing.
Marketers and customers share the digital environment, and in the quest for marketers to deliver better personal experiences, customers are expecting superior customer experiences, so digital marketing alone does not cut it anymore. Enter data driven marketing for 2019.
What's so special about data? In today's marketing environment, data collection and analysis are better able to answer any question, over and above any other marketing tool. Moreover, the only constant in this ever-changing digital environment is the ability to capture data and apply those data points for better results.
Customer Knowledge is Power
S.W.O.T. analyses are an excellent method to understand the competitive landscape and how a brand is faring. However, S.W.O.T. findings rarely if ever solve over-arching questions in how to understand and gauge the brand's customers expectations. Therefore, it is incumbent upon marketers and brands to find answers to those questions.
Did your well-thought-out campaign fail to deliver better ROI? Examine Your Data. Do your marketing efforts appear to be less engaging than predicted? Examine Your Data. Are customers and prospects complaining about their experiences? Examine Your Data. Do you need to develop better ad campaigns? Examine Your Data.
Digital changes remain a constant variable for all marketers. Consider the vast number of social media destinations, including new devices emerging in the marketplace. Therefore, marketers are kept busy understanding how and where customers and prospects are spending their time. Data collection and analysis helps with these marketing challenges.
Marketers typically rely on experience, intuition and indirect information to build ad and marketing campaigns. In the age of accountability, second-hand data can be misleading. Brands can now capture customer and prospect data at the source. Brands that focus on eliciting data from their digital infrastructure will be the winners in 2019. The successful brands of 2019 are the ones that make the change from a digital-first ideology to a data-first mentality.
The data-first mantra uncovers the complete customer journey, thus providing a 24/7 360 degree view that covers both the digital and traditional touch-points. Digital and traditional channels are shifting and converging due to the Internet of Things (IoT), and understanding how those channels are intersecting is readily available via data ownership.
Convergence of Convenience and Customization
After the market crash in 2008, commonly known as the Great Recession of 2008, employment dissatisfaction numbers rose to 86%. Imagine that 86% of all people working in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008 were voicing displeasure with their jobs.
Fast forward to 2019, and a recent survey from Adyen depicts that during the past 12 months, 86% of U.S. consumers left a store due to long checkout lines. These consumers either did not make a purchase or made purchases at a different retailer.
Numbers matter. The effect of 86% of consumers who left the purchasing environment resulted in a collective $38~ billion loss. These resulting loss in sales are a direct reflection of consumer inconvenience, which translates into frustration. Consumers expect a fast-moving, seamless shopping experience whether it is digital or traditional.
Brands that can rise to the challenge of making it easier for consumers to purchase across all touch-points, including information gathering will win the convenience race. Convenience offerings include curbside pickup, checkout-free options, timely deliveries, free deliveries, online order, and online payment, to name a few options brands may need to consider.
80%! According to Epsilon research, 80% of customers are more likely to engage companies that provide personalized experiences. Besides, consumers shop over three times more frequently with brands that deliver on the personalization guarantee. Between personalized experience and guaranteed personalization is a story that customers love. Further, America loves great stories that contain heroes and happy endings. However, in the mind of most consumers, they are the heroes that brands need to create messaging for, and it is their voices that echo brand acceptance.
Convenience and customization are the new battlegrounds for 2019. Walmart is already moving forward with its Jetblack home delivery strategy where AI and shopper expertise meet in the middle. Walmart's Jetblack delivery process starts with a 10-minute phone call identifying shopping preferences. Another part of this process can include Walmart personnel visiting a customer's residence.
Once inside the residence, products in refrigerators and pantries make their way into a scanning process to construct a list that includes brand favorites. In short, Walmart gets a customer shopping preference list, and the customer gains a custom, personalized experience.
Data Onboarding
Customer identity resolution is now an indispensable marketing tool. In the mid-2000s, marketers were onboarding offline consumer data to online environments. The onboarding marketing process is an effort to align customer data with digital identifiers. The method of onboarding results is the backbone behind content marketing creation. Content marketing relies on data-driven mapping for each consumer, consumer group or niche market.
Typically, third-party vendors institute the onboarding process whose focus is to resolve customer identities. The onboarding process involves uploading a brand's customer data files and then matching these files against digital identifiers. The last step is delivering the resulting customer profiles to various media outlets. The completion of this process can take as many as five to seven days which is an eternity in the digital universe.
The challenge with uploading batch customer files via third-party vendors occurs when data fails to match a customer. When data fails to match a customer identifier during the upload process, customer activity that happens post-upload is lost and is no longer part of the initial upload. The challenge for brands and marketers in 2019 is to create a continuous real-time boarding solution. Capturing, merging and activating customer data instantly aids brands in customer identification throughout the touch-points.
Data Control
Marketers and brands are looking at better methods to control their data. It was often seen to be very cool for brands to outsource their data collection to third party vendors. However, one needs to consider the data debacle of Cambridge Analytica's data breach in 2018. Facebook's numerous data breaches led to the largest single-day loss in the history of the US stock market. Facebook lost a whopping $119 billion as a result of these data breaches, which was the primary reason their user growth stalled.
Data collection is here to stay and is an integral part of communication and commercial interests. However, as more corporate data mishaps occur, new legislation will be forthcoming. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Privacy Act legislation are the two latest attempts at governments stepping in to help organizations control data privacy concerns.
Now that industry regulators are paying attention to data collection, 2019 and beyond will demand that data ownership and control be transparent and under higher protection. Expect customers to react by abstaining from brands that fail to take their data concerns seriously.
Data is a Tradable Commodity
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) recently stated that 76% of US consumers said they would trade their data in exchange for something of value. Over half of these consumers also stated that trusting a company is the most significant factor for sharing their data. The DMA report also stated that 82 percent of these respondents also cited transparency as a critical factor related to data collection methods, not to mention how it may be of benefit to them.
The Net-Net
The current data collection landscape continues to be under scrutiny as brands grapple with having confidence in extracting insights from data. Brands that can surpass data crises and turn that process into opportunities will be the brands that rise above the competition. When brands are putting their data first party in place, those brands have a stronger chance to avoid being dead last among their competitors. Thanks for reading "Data Driven Marketing Trumps Digital."
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