It seems every week, sometimes every day, I come across another traditional marketing problem being solved. I don’t think traditional is quite appropriate here, even now we’re finding solutions to digital opportunities that we created only years ago, which seem antiquated all the same.
That’s not to say that marketing is becoming easier or that it requires any less human guidance. Marketing is, after all, about human interaction (for B2B marketers, remember corporations are people too).
For example, we’re seeing the algorithms behind marketing automation become more complex so the process of automation is easier to run, but it still requires a human understanding of that process for it to be effectively setup and maintained.
I read this listicle on 5 Australian digital statistics, and see a lot of opportunity when it comes to understanding more about the behaviours of consumers and what motivates them to spend or not spend. Already there are complexities involved in how this data could become useful to a marketer.
Australian’s are reaching a digital tipping point, where online activity will surpass TV as the primary means of entertainment (as someone who doesn’t own a television I’m what you would call an early-adopter). This increased movement to online presents an opportunity for greater customer-data collection. But it gets tricky because Australians are increasingly using more and more platforms and browsers.
So there’s an opportunity to identify and track the same customer across all devices and platforms and pull this data into a single analytics platform. This is for all intents purposes, a single customer view – the ability to identify interactions across all platforms for a single customer.
The result of which, at its most basic, would look something like this:
The above dashboard shows all interactions across web, app, social and phone for a single customer over a certain period of time. When we start to incorporate more technical analytics, such as a customer’s web experience (page speed, JavaScript errors) we can form a highly accurate view of the customer. Once we start to incorporate historical offline data, you can see how valuable a single customer can be for an organisation.
There’s still an open consensus on what that value really is. Marketers mainly want to prove the ROI.
Personally, I feel its real value is not monetary. It’s about attitudes. It’s about rethinking campaign planning so we start thinking about single customers, and not demographics.
Any attitudinal change where we start thinking about the human element of marketing can only be a good thing.
Daniel Dewar is content marketing manager at Datalicious.
