Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Big Data holds the potentially to describe target customers with an accuracy and level of detail unfathomable only a decade ago. While old-school marketing efforts were limited to things like tracking returns on direct mail campaigns, or number of subscribers to newsletters, modern marketers can have data on people’s exercise habits, digital clicking behavior, time spent on various sites, purchasing history, personal preferences based on social media postings, time awake, time spent in the car, caloric intake, and almost anything else you can imagine. 

So it makes sense that marketers would be chomping at the Big Data bit. 

But how should marketers leverage this new quantified customer landscape in the best way?

...Today, cross-channel attribution can give us more insight into the customer journey than we've ever had before. Where they were once imaginary things meant to illustrate the way marketing efforts work together, today we can literally see our marketing funnels in action, visualized on-screen. Since the conceptual is becoming less important than the actual, the lines between stages of the funnel are blurring, and the flow of the funnel is becoming all that matters.

Because of this meshing of channels, we are witnessing a need for approaches to marketing that embrace the convergence of media. Who cares what PR did? What does it matter if it was your content marketing team or your sales enablement team who used to get the credit for a new tranche of prospects? Today, a marketing win is a win for marketing, and a win for digital.

Some companies are investing in extracting insights from digital channels that can be applied to digital channels, regardless of departmental titles. They do this for clients, but more and more, their marketing analytics teams also help them understand their business better....