Are you already doing data-driven marketing?
Predicting behaviour
Data-driven marketing sounds so beautiful. Using data to approach prospects and customers in a truly personalised way. Simply a question of offering the right message at the right time via the right channel. And with the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can even predict the behaviour of visitors.
Netflix is a good example of this preditive analytics and predicts which film or series you will like. And leads you to the content that suits you and makes you stay a subscriber longer. Or think of online shops that suggest certain products you might like to buy based on previous purchases or purchases of people with a similar customer profile.
But did you know that an average customer journey, i.e. the path taken by a prospect through Google searches, banners, mailings, advertisements, phone calls, chats, catalogues, physical shop or webshop visits, has between 20 and 500 contact moments? Just imagine collecting all that big data from all those different sources, analysing it correctly and applying it smartly and properly for better marketing efforts.
Useful tools
Tools and solutions enough. Google Analytics, CRM packages, web analytics tools, Customer Data Platforms, marketing automation solutions and all kinds of clear business intelligence dashboards. And yes, it does work that if someone lives in Groningen, they will see a different (local) banner at the check-out page of your webshop than someone from Maastricht.
And now?
Developments in this area are rapid. Even top companies with large marketing departments and budgets are starting to discover that they cannot keep all the expertise in house to do data-driven marketing. And sometimes they have to bring in expertise from outside and focus internally on core competences such as marketing strategy, proposition and customer experience. And then we're not even talking about the practical implementation of all those data-driven marketing efforts. The mailings that need to be sent, the online flows that need to run, the landing pages that need to go live, the customer questions that come in. The good news is that you can leave those kinds of online, offline and real-time execution activities to one party...
