Nearly 80 percent of global marketers say customer data is critical to their marketing and advertising efforts, according to the 2017 report The Global Review of Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising by GDMA and Winterberry Group. It’s great news given this hasn’t always been the case. Even in certain markets, like Latin America, use of first-party data is still scarce. But widespread use of data of all kinds if growing. And with technologies like identity solutions and artificial intelligence coming to bear, marketers will have even more variables to leverage to understand consumers across channels and devices. Here are three areas that will affect how customers use data for their marketing efforts in the years to come.
1. Identity: Identity is the foundation of marketing. The average consumer uses three to five devices and spends 5.6 hours/day online, with half of that on a mobile device. Without knowing who your consumers are across increasingly fragmented devices, you risk lack of scale, attribution inaccuracies and improper frequency management. A solution in which you can track cross-device in a deterministic way and cookieless in a probabilistic way gives you the best match of accuracy and scale. The ability to use this data down to a granular level across platforms is key.
2. Artificial intelligence: Simply put, AI interprets the vast quantities of both structured and unstructured data emerging from the very digital touchpoints mentioned above and then extracts actionable insights quicker than any human marketer can. The ability to ingest other variables such as weather and mood enables more right time, right message marketing than ever before. Identity is crucial for getting the most out of AI, as you need a single identifier across touch points and data sets to formulate a unified view of your individual customers.
3. Location data: All that time consumers are spending on mobile is generating an explosion of data, and location data in particular is bridging the gap between online and offline marketing. The ability to track a user throughout their day enables marketers to see if their campaigns drove a user to a physical store. Certain location measurement vendors can also compare the movements of ad-exposed users to non-exposed ones, meaning that marketers can attribute foot traffic to a campaign at the user-level.
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