One way to start harmonizing your communications is to eliminate the siloed approach to digital marketing tactics, where branding is walled off from performance or direct response efforts. Next-gen analytics allow results from one half of this tandem to inform more finely-tuned optimization in the other half, leading to better allocation of dollars. This type of coordination has the dual effect of increasing the number of sales and conversations, as well as ROI, delivering improved campaign scale and efficiency.
The way to make this happen is by leveraging "big data." And by that I don't just mean an uncultivated mass of millions of user interactions (e.g., log files, website analytics data, and customer data). I'm talking about a focused approach that ties together integration, synchronization, data mining, and predictive analytics. Just dumping it all into a data management platform (DMP) is not going to get the job done. Without true data integration, you will still have only loosely connected individual digital marketing tactics.
So, what are some key tactics to achieving harmonized marketing?
- It has to begin with the consumer: What audience is he in and what are his needs? For this you have to bring in demographics and attributes, updating them in real time to find out who they are, what they're like, whether they have kids, whether they have a high household income, what type of neighborhood they live in, etc.
- Once you bring all this data together in an audience-focused way, you can create initial segmentation.
- Based on that, you can determine how to impact the needs surfaced through analysis of the demographic data, including the level of interaction and marketing investment needed for each segment in order to move it along the purchase funnel.
- One often overlooked way to do this is to identify and utilize the optimal frequency range (OFR) for each segment that will drive the greatest level of response, avoiding under-investment and waste while improving performance.
Memo to marketers: You need to find the connecting thread of data that links all your tactics together from first exposure to conversion, from the top of the funnel to the bottom. This will give each consumer a coherent, coordinated stream of relevant communication, and the marketer gets a total program that scales.
The promise of cross-channel marketing is not a fantasy; leading companies are making it a reality today. Harmonization across multiple consumer touch points is enabling the creation of a more relevant, engaging experience for the consumer and greater results for the marketer. This type of data-driven, cross-channel approach will be a differentiator for marketers, providing greater alignment between their messaging and the new ways content is being accessed and consumed.
John Nardone is CEO of [x+1].
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