“In God we trust, all others must bring data” – William Edwards Deming (statistician)
The numerous marketing systems today with distinct functions, make marketers switch between multiple tabs/windows to effectively market and understand its impact. Additionally, the digital advertising spectrum keeps widening with the growing numbers of mar-tech providers, technologists and data solution providers. What solution really maps individual customer journeys or which one allows you to market effectively? Do you spend time in sourcing reports and preparing a single Excel doc to have a holistic customer profile?
Because according to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report 2017, on an average an enterprise uses 91 marketing automated platforms. Dive a little deeper and you’ll find that based on “functions”, there are close to 180 display and programmatic advertising solutions and around 161 marketing automation and campaign management platforms. This clearly depicts how complicated the life of a marketer really is. Multiple platforms that result in data silos also bring about work duplication, which means, more man-hours are spent on collation of reports than actually driving business with insights. Disconnected platforms that house customer data make data management challenging.
Busy But Not Bright?
Marketers spend hours collating data from point-of-sale (POS) systems, client relationship management (CRM) software, loyalty program databases and more. Once this tedious task is through, they resort to marketing platforms and automation tools. Do you see how many platforms and interfaces they deal with? Imagine the amount of offline data (POS, CRM etc.) a marketer really has in reserve? This is where a platforms like customer data platforms (CDP) and data management platforms (DMP) becomes handy. CDPs allow marketers to exercise control over their customer data but does not that erase the need for a marketing automation platform. CDP vendors are specialized in automation, tag management and/or deriving personalized insights, but still does not cover marketing attribution. Similarly, DMPs power data-driven marketing powered but cannot double as a marketing platform.
Marketers have their hands on multiple software platforms but they’re still short of time and a single view of customers.
A Bright Ray Of Hope
The need of the hour is a solution with the ability to ingest data from multiple sources, make customer buckets, shoot relevant ads and attribute success to the right advertising mediums. One platform to do all that!
A unified data management solution that provides predictive insights, automates marketing and subsequently feeds on campaign data for further intelligence is your fix! Marketers’ work would be more effective when insights, analytics and ad-dollar spend views appear in on a single window. This digital activation helps marketers innovate based on the intent and interest of target customers resulting in effective ad-dollar spends.
