Unify Your Customer Data
Smartphones, laptops, tablets, connected televisions, wearables, and enabled appliances. . . the average American household now owns 11 connected devices. Each device produces its own data to enhance the consumer experience. The number of devices and the data they generate will increase as new 5G networks gain traction this year. 1
Today people spend less than 15 seconds on a website and more than 21 hours per week on the internet.2,3 Each online engagement also generates data. Combining these facts with new regulatory scrutiny to diminish the efficacy of third-party cookies, and unifying customer data has become one of the most significant challenges in consumer marketing.
Massive Volumes Of New Data Increase Marketing Complexity
There are more than 1.2 billion websites.4 Everyday people generate billions of emails and text messages exchanged under the pervasive influence of social media. These activities occur at the speed of thought and generate petabytes of new data – in real-time. (A petabyte of data equals 1024 terabytes. For context, the producers of Avatar needed a petabyte of storage to render their graphics, and a person would need to take more than 4,000 photos a day – over their lifetime to capture a petabyte of data.5)
Unifying Consumer Data Combines First Party Information With Behavioral And Digital Insight
The challenges associated with unifying data across channels and devices are significant. The unification process begins with developing an accurate and persistent identity linking people to their devices as they engage with brands across online and offline channels.
In marketing, the unification process blends accurate identities and first-party information (i.e. transactions, products, and prices) with privacy-compliant, third-party insight (i.e. mobile address IDs, social handles, and site visitation patterns). Digital third-party data is a powerful ingredient because it adds contextual relevance and behavior insight to help drive real-time activation.
People Control Their Interactions, But Brands Can Influence The Process
People spend more than 2 hours a day shopping at work6. They reengage on social media with cellphones, experience products on connected televisions, read peer reviews on tablets, and text from watches. Today the choice to engage belongs to the consumers. Brands that understand this also understand that unified data is the conduit to influencing consumer choice.
Enlightened brands unify data to provide dynamic insight into purchasing intent. These brands leverage unified insight to influence consumers in real-time and at critical points during their engagement process. For example, understanding the demographic characteristics, location, and digital visitation patterns of a person looking for an online recipe, helps the publisher curate real-time messaging, coordinate social advertising, and customize editorial content for the audience. By holistically unifying the data across channels, the brand is able to reinforce their digital outreach with a targeted email initiative and a connected television campaign to activate micro-segments in specific geographic areas.
The Urgent Need For Action
If unifying your data is not a marketing priority, then it should be. Here why:
- New legislation and regulatory changes governing data privacy are depreciating the value of third-party cookies.
- Large walled gardens at places like Google, Facebook, and Amazon challenge independence and open access to digital communication.
- The explosion of new, dislocated data sources makes performance evaluation (attribution) nearly impossible unless the data are incorporated into unified profiles.
We encourage brands to act. This can be done by developing an identity graph that supports omnichannel marketing strategies. Our Super Identity Graph is used by some of the most progressive brands in America because we have privacy-compliant insight into the channel behavior of 236 million people that produces results.
Notes:
2https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/chartbeat-website-engagement-data-nj
3https://www.statista.com/statistics/319732/daily-time-spent-online-device/
4https://siteefy.com/how-many-websites-are-there/
5https://www.lifewire.com/terabytes-gigabytes-amp-petabytes-how-big-are-they-4125169
6https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/11/americans-spend-nearly-two-hours-a-day-shopping-online-at-work.html
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