Marketers have a love/hate relationship with data. While data poses a real headache for some marketers, they know it can be their best asset if used properly. But with so much data available, it’s hard to know where to start.
The management of data is critical as it provides the insights marketers need to reach and engage relevant target audiences. A recent report by The Harvard Business Review found that data management is the top marketing challenge for organisations. This is supported by a global study that found that 92% of marketers expect data to become increasingly important to marketing efforts, with 80% stating it already plays an important role. However, with the volume, variety and velocity of data increasing at an exponential rate, marketers are faced with significant challenges in uncovering actionable insights.
Today, the digital lives of people are distributed across a multitude of devices and they are used to shape our online and offline journeys. The result of this has been an increase in advertising revenue across industries, spread across more players and platforms than ever. The real challenge, and the promise of data, for marketers is to deliver personalised and meaningful customer engagement.
So how do brands utilise the benefits of data-driven marketing across the necessary channels while getting the best value for their money? One important factor is ensuring consumers are targeted, not only when and where it’s most effective, but also the optimal amount of times. The notion of controlling the frequency of audience targeting is just as important as ensuring the message is delivered via the right channel. How do marketers find that sweet spot?
Embrace Attribution Modeling
For major brands with hundreds of campaigns every month, running across multiple media and programmatic channels, audience duplication and frequency overexposure is extremely wasteful. Bombarding consumers with ads is not only a waste of advertising dollars, it also leads to annoying and negative brand perception. Fed-up consumers who install ad-blockers also reduce the earning potential of publishers. In fact, frequency management, orchestrated across all systems, is a critical component in ensuring a healthy digital ecosystem.
Attribution modeling, the process mapping and allocating credit towards the marketing touch-points that preceded a conversion within a customer journey, is key to helping brands accurately assess campaign effectiveness and find that sweet spot of optimal frequency of engagement. With new generation big data platforms that provide highly flexible and complete attribution modeling capabilities, marketers are getting keen insight into just how many messages and content their target audience needs to see where and how often.
The value of attribution is well recognised by marketers. A recent study by Econsultancy found that this is a key technology investment priority for senior marketing decision-makers. We see more and more brands, moving to mitigate the impact of audience duplication and frequency overexposure by turning to attribution modeling solutions that increase ROI of advertising campaigns.
Find the Right Data Partner
Data provides the opportunity to ask new questions, gain new insights and take action to transform marketing effectiveness. Data need not burden brands with the heavy lifting chores of managing complex technologies and advanced attribution modeling solutions. For those needs, the right data partner with the right Data Management Platform (DMP) is essential for marketers. The right DMP provides the end-to-end capabilities marketers need to discover and reach their audience, at the right place, right time and right frequency.
The new generation of big-data DMPs, play a vital role in managing and activating data for marketers. The infrastructure available to most web operators was architected to count pages and deliver ads. However, these legacy systems fail to meet the scalability and analytic challenges of the modern audience-driven digital media market. Today, only a few companies have had the vision and foresight to invest in true big data solutions - and rarer still are the ones who have built the new and massively scalable ‘system of engagement’ for global people data.
The marketer with the best-in-class, real-time and no limits DMP partner is now empowered to offer tangible value and transformative ROIs that demonstrate their success to the boardroom. They are not only using their data to manage efficiency and waste, they are in the differentiated league of businesses who are redefining digital marketing in the data era.
Jo Gaines, Country Manager ANZ, Krux Digital
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