“How can I achieve more from marketing – faster and with fewer resources” is one of the biggest, and most frequently posed questions I’m asked by marketers.
It’s no wonder this question is increasingly important considering the demise of IDFA and third-party cookies, and the dramatic growth in data volumes resulting from Covid-19’s locked-down shoppers. As a result, limited time and resources have become the primary factors that impact marketing success (if they weren’t already).
If you’re a marketer, you’ll know most of the answers you need are hiding deep within your rapidly growing collection of first party data – spanning websites, stores, apps, CRM, ESP, Point of Sale and more.
This begs the bigger question of how to quickly (and easily) extract that value and put it to use. And more importantly, how to understand your most important customer groups and publish them into all the marketing channels to dramatically improve campaigns?
But, before I answer those hot-potato questions, let’s take into consideration another burning marketer challenge… customer data management.
As well as trying to do more with less, the Marketers I regularly chat with just find it too difficult to unify all their data, extract relevant customer groups, and publish them for use across their vital marketing and ad channels. There seem to be three common reasons for this:
- Information is stored in so many different silos across the organization that integrating, consolidating and finding the real value is too hard. This issue is only getting worse as more systems are added and data volumes skyrocket.
- Most solutions appear too complex and costly – many requiring expensive IT and consultancy projects to setup and run. Bang goes your speed-to-market too!
- Finding the most important audience segments to focus on is a dark art. For example, what looks like your top online customer could also be your biggest product returner according to customer support data. Without joining those dots it’s too easy to send the wrong offers to the wrong people – disaster!
So, to summarize the questions so far; how can marketers solve these challenges while staying ahead of the competition? How can they react faster and smarter… with less? What’s a quick solution they can deploy simply in days not months? And a solution they can use in-department with limited resources?
The ultimate solution will allow them to run very rapid tests, so they can explore new audience segments, try different messages across multiple marketing channels and confidently measure results.
After all, successful marketing tools should empower the ability to quickly test, evolve and repeat… all with clarity, speed and intelligence – not lots of unnecessary bells and whistles.
“No one got fired for buying IBM” is the safe-bet rhetoric behind choosing a big brand like Adobe, Oracle or Salesforce, especially if their products are already used somewhere in the company. But these big tech brands are almost always the ‘sledgehammer to crack a walnut’ overkill for what marketer’s need to win right now. Again, based on the conversations I’ve had, adopting these solution results in massive delays, confusion and aborted projects.
Furthermore, their complex setup and ongoing consultancy take them out of departmental budgets into the realm of corporate expenditure. Complexities and costs also force the inclusion of more resources – other departments, such as IT. Whether you’re launching campaigns or responding to market changes, the result is displaced control and significantly slower marketing.
“So, what’s the Answer Jules” I hear you cry!
Well, my answer to all of these questions is simple… try something new! Ignore all the fancy thinly veiled big brand promises and try something that’s been built for marketers…by marketers! Try a solution that’s simple and focused on enabling you to master your audience, while giving your marketing a boost of intelligence (without the complexity or hidden costs).
And yes, you guessed it, Audiens is precisely the solution to all those challenges… but you knew that didn’t you?
Joking aside, marketers face an ever-growing data-based challenge. It was Einstein who said…
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”
So, it’s time for something new. Something that works!
Want to see how Audiens lets you do more, faster and with less resource? Request a free consultation and I’ll tell you more – I’ll even involve our data experts to give you some great free advice.
Nothing to lose right? Well, apart from time, money, results… I could go on…
By Jules Ridley, Growth Development Director, Audiens