Real Time, Real Data, and Really Informed Marketing

Building a brand takes time. It's a complex process driven by a relentless decision flow, informed by countless hours spent micro-testing marketing scenarios to gauge response, adjust, and repeat. Honing messaging is an endless quest where intuition and "best guess" logic have reigned king; until now...

Never before, have we been able to listen, visualize, and react to the customer as we can today. Aggregation of customer data, from touch points encompassing both online and offline, have empowered a new generation of marketing and customer experience tracking driven by data, data, data.

The best businesses are already making data-driven testing a big part of their marketing strategies. Adobe recently conducted research on this idea, separating businesses into the most successful 20 percent and the other 80. The findings showed a stark difference – 70 percent of today’s best companies say that data-driven testing is a priority, versus only 46 percent of the rest of the pack. - Chelsea Segal

Michael Krypel, executive director at Adobe, says this reflects a need on the part of all marketing leaders to optimize their strategies.

Data visualization tools, and hyper connected systems across marketing, customer service, content, and point-of-sale; now allow for real-time customer experience monitoring and marketing experimentation with little to no additional cost.

In addition, content marketing is now an important part of the mix and is driving much higher customer to product engagement and promotion. Customers are more likely to respond to an article or video than via a traditional advertisement, such as an a banner ad. With this, knowing what types of content your customer consumes, when and how they consume it, and what resonates is imperative to the process, with data being the key ingredient.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of any marketing campaign must hinge on conversion rates. Knowing which products are valued, which experience is memorable, which customer touch point needs attention, in real time, fuels the virtuous cycle between the customer, product development, sales, and marketing.

Marketing testing scenarios have never been easier, with unlimited market segmentation possibilities and digital delivery via the connected platform to groups, both large and small. All initiatives can now be cross-channel and spun up with relative ease, catalogued and correlated in a way that tells a story that can be replayed and repeated. Data can also be sliced and diced across the enterprise, regions, or individual customers with the same effort. All of this in-depth customer touch point data can immediately be correlated to customer satisfaction and conversion rates, informing a business where to make their next move.

The advent of data driven marketing is upon us, and real-time is the name of the game. Goodbye to the disconnected, crystal ball based campaigns of the past. We now live in the world of real time, real data, and really informed marketing.