Is it possible that marketers are out there raving about how data is the future, yet secretly hiding behind ‘data complexity’? All signs point to yes, and this is because they have not yet found out how to harness data in their marketing initiatives just yet. In essence, we believe in the impact of data but aren’t sure how it fits into our world yet. It’s more of a futurist idea than a real value-add today.
As marketers, we’re in the business of behaviour change and The Fogg Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation; Ability; and Trigger. When a behaviour change does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing. So, how can data equip us in each of these elements?
Motivation:
Every BIG IDEAin marketing is entered around key consumer insight, the motivating factor for change. It speaks to the heart of people and it the central reason for the success of an idea. The trouble is that it takes time to identify the key insights and build creative ideas around them. In today’s world of instant consumers, we are facing a challenge as marketers to understand customer insights and consumer shifts quicker than ever before.
Managing data stores and accessing consumer and business data efficiently will make it possible for marketers and agencies to understand their consumers faster. I’d say real-time here, but that’s a pipe dream that doesn’t work in reality. It’s possible to reduce the time to identify insights from weeks to hours, and then the creative process is able to start sooner than ever before.
In this light, managing data accessibility, storage and organisation to better show marketers key insights will help marketers deliver great value back into the market faster than their competition.
Simplicity:
If you’re not using consumer data to make peoples’ lives simpler, then you are losing out on one of the biggest marketing benefits in the relationship between marketing and data. Some have chosen to over-complicate this process by referring to single customer views and the Omni-channel customer. I agree with their sentiment, but the complexity has meant that we have put a hold on our data driven opportunities. We can start today in driving simpler processes for our customers by using our knowledge to make it easier for them to buy from us.
Programmatic advertising has stepped into this world in a very big way, and has shown us that it’s possible to provide data driven systems that simplify a customer’s life without the Omni-channel approach. We need to shift our thinking, in this regard, to shorter innovative cycles instead of long term Omni-channel solutions. Hopefully marketers realise they need to run both long term Omni-channel solutions alongside short innovation data-driven solutions for customers.
Triggers:
Finally, data can be used to better understand the environment of your customer and drive better solutions to them based on their environment. Programmatic advertising, again, can assist here. I enjoyed seeing how Canon used publicly available data to understand photographic conditions in cities and then used this information to display tips to get better photos to photographers in the area. Enriching our data houses with public data can create a wealth of opportunity to serve better brand experiences to our customers.
Originally published as How data helps marketers be more innovative on Bizcommunity
