Companies are collecting more data about their customers to create personalised experiences, leading to bringing marketing analysis in-house. Yuval Ben Itzhak, CEO at Socialbakers, highlights the need for speed, how speed and agility is crucial to a successful marketing campaign and making sure every potential customers can be reached.
Brands are in the midst of a digital transformation. For the first time, they can target and hyper-target customers and influencers at a level of precision and personalisation never possible before, and they’re able to do it consistently across numerous channels and customer touchpoints.
Increasingly, brand marketing is data marketing. Data marketing requires technology, which is why martech spending rose by 30 percent last year according to Gartner, and 77 percent of social media marketers now use martech tools according to WARC.
To achieve micro-targeting and mass personalisation, companies have to manage their customer journeys methodically across every touchpoint. Doing so is highly complex, as it requires managing huge quantities of data across multiple channels per customer on a massive scale. Given the tremendous complexities involved, many companies from Getty to the NHL are bringing the marketing analysis in-house, where they have more control of the customer experience and are able to own their own customer data.
Multi-Channel Customer Touchpoints Define a Brand Experience
It’s no longer effective to communicate with every potential customer in the same manner. Specific audiences demand personalised experiences. Data and AI help brands segment their audience and better serve each segment. That’s where personalisation begins. AI and data analysis are the only options to make scalability practical.
Speed and agility are crucial. Customer touchpoints take place across multiple channels, so it’s important for systems to speak to each other quickly, creating a fast data feedback loop.
The most effective marketers tweak their online marketing on a daily or hourly basis and respond to trends or issues as close to real time as possible. Turnarounds, strategy tweaks, and personalisation can be implemented almost immediately when data is stored and analysed in-house. Brands can deliver the experiences customers want through agile personalisation.
Agility is the primary driver for brands to move marketing in-house but integrating and managing all of that data is not a simple job.
What Previously Stopped Brands from In-Housing?
Martech is making in-housing practical in a way that it simply wasn’t before. Gathering, managing and leveraging data across communication channels meant adding constantly more martech point solutions to the enterprise stack. This enlarged the stacks to a point that it’s highly challenging to visualise key data in a way that’s actionable.
More than 50 percent of marketers feel their companies lack the technology to manage content, and 35 percent say they don’t make full use of the technology that they do have. It’s not that the technology doesn’t work; it’s that they haven’t connected their technology in a way that enables them to assess and take thoughtful action.
Touchpoints are everywhere and consolidating key omnichannel data while staying up-to-date takes some pretty intense work. There’s now a piece of technology to manage each task a marketer needs to undertake, but it’s still a lot of work to get and analyse data from all those different systems.
Fortunately, smart AI solutions are now widely available to in-house teams, so brands can either get on board the in-house data train or risk getting left behind. These AI solutions negate the need to gather data from different systems manually and separately. Instead, they aggregate data from across channels onto one AI platform that connects the data dots from various marketing systems.
New solutions connect, manage and leverage data across channels, enabling marketers to create marketing personas to drive strategy, track and analyse campaigns with AI, and identify influencers for each brand. Finally, brands have the tools to manage their entire marketing loop without the need to outsource.
Best yet, these solutions enable brands to own their own customer data. Today it’s the companies with the best data that win. Data can no longer be outsourced. It must be a core competency that is managed in-house as part of the holistic whole.
In the future, brands will rise and fall based on who uses their data best. The time to take action is now.
By Yuval Ben-Itzhak
CEO