As humans, we see hundreds of different messages every day presented to us, and we only retain around three.

As a marketer, you need to figure out a way to cut through the clutter with your marketing and advertising messages.

Data-driven marketing is a big deal because it’s all about having a more relevant conversation with your audiences and with your customers.

It’s all about having the right message to the right person at the right time in place.

The data and the insights give you great tools to help you understand what buying mode is a consumer and what products are they interested in.

What sorts of things, what life stages are they in and therefore what are the right products to present to them?

In what form and what things matter to them. Is it price? Is that a location for a travel destination? Or is it a new car seat for the baby?

What are the things that they’re interested in?

What’s relevant and what are they going to act upon.

Why does this all matter?

With big data you can now predict your customer’s needs, their pain points and even future complaints. By analysing the data and detecting patterns and make predictions.

The implications are huge!

When hurricane Frances was on its way, and everyone was preparing Walmart decided to be smart about it.

While more stores are stocking up with items like flashlights, Walmart’s stacked shelves with strawberry pop-tarts. Armed with terabytes of customer history data, Walmart was able to wager that of all its items pop-tarts would be the ones most in demand.

They went ahead and stocked their stores with seven times the usual amount and almost sold out.

Walmart began using predictive technology in 2004, to determine what customers most want to purchase leading up to a storm.

Walmart has learned that Strawberry Pop-Tarts are one of the most purchased food items, especially after storms, as they require no heating, can be used at any meal, and last forever,” economist Steve Horwitz, who studied Walmart’s response to Hurricane Katrina, told ABC News in 2011.

Just before Hurricane Frances in 2004, when Walmart realised its customers’ penchant for toaster pastries and beer, the company sent extra truckloads to stores in the hurricane’s path. The move paid off in profit when the additional inventory sold quickly.

Then we have Netflix who use big data to pretty much design the success of the popular show “House of cards”.

They use the massive amount of data collected over the years to guide the creative direction of the show.

So strong was their confidence in the show success that they signed off on two seasons even before the pilot. A hundred million dollar vote of confidence because of big data.

So how does any of this matter for your venture?

Big names are not the only ones capitalising on big data.

Smaller companies with small budgets are also taking advantage of big data.

Targeted Facebook ads are an especially good example of this when it comes to personal information.

Facebook’s collection of data is simply unmatched.

Facebook can predict what a user will be interested in purchasing in the coming days weeks and even months.

Typical mistakes marketers make is not considering the complete customer buying journey over different channels of communication. Only analysing how many times they’ve reached a customer via emails, but failing to consider how many times that customer has been targeted on Youtube and Facebook.

Marketers at all performance levels struggle to leverage data from different sources in their quest to execute a connected customer experience.

This presents a real challenge when people are interacting with your organization across so many different channels.

You’ve got opportunities with social media, with mobile, with the web in so many different ways that you can interact with your customer.

The consumer is looking for an experience where regardless of how they’re interacting with you.

They expect you to know all that information about them. Know that they were just on the website and now they’re calling a call centre about a specific problem.

We’ve all had that kind of horrendous customer service experience where you call, and you talk to one person you explain the problem, and they have to then refer you on to somebody else, and you explain that problem over and over again.

It’s bad enough when it happens on one channel, but then you’ve combined that across channels and it gets that much worse.

That’s the kind of problem that data-driven marketing promises to solve.

Solutions

Leverage the power of data to optimise media market messaging, making sure prospects see the right number of messages across a campaign.

Customer experience mapping is a good exercise for any company not yet proficient in their use of data.

Understanding the path your customers take and following the different touch points in the lead up to a sale, is extremely valuable.

Your marketing can be so much more effective when you know how many times a prospect searched for your product or company,  talked about you on social and watched your video content, basically what their behaviour was before buying your product. Use this information to create a marketing campaign that’s appropriate, with the right distribution and speed, which is the journey to influence conversion.

As marketers’ data capabilities become more advanced, they should know the role every single piece of marketing, creative and channel plays in conversion and personalisation.

Data Management Platforms allows marketers and media companies to take all of their data across all of their different sources and pull it into one place and start to understand.

Pull out key learnings.

Pull out key insights and use that to drive and inform all of their marketing and advertising activity.

Data Management Platforms helps with the understanding of the customer journey and one-to-one marketing through gathering all of that data, so we’re collecting every single touch point every single interaction. We’re understanding when the interaction happened, in what sequence, over what period and we can start to realise the role of all the different types of media and advertising that formed the conversion.

Where does search play a role? Where does your owned-and-operated website play a role? Where does digital video content play a role and when do they view those pieces of content.

How often before they make a purchase and you can’t do that without a single source of data. You need a single source of truth which is what the Data Management Platforms provides.

The role of a CRM

We know that customers are demanding a more personalised experience. In fact, 52% of consumers (and 65% of B2B buyers) say they’re likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalise communications to them. But brands can only personalise effectively if they know who their customers are – their information, behaviours and preferences. A CRM platform is critical in tracking and using this data.

By leveraging all of the data our customers give us, we can understand who our happy customers are, who our lapsed customers are, how many interactions we have with them, how many products they’ve purchased, etc.

Contact Fortix and let’s work together to make your data work for you.