COVID-19 has forced advertisers to think ahead and future-proof their media strategy. In particular, brands are asking themselves if they are doing enough to take advantage of their first-party data. Here are some suggestions for advertisers if their organization’s identity and CRM efforts are still early stages:
Develop a Plan
First, develop a plan. Take inventory of all vendors and platforms leveraged and ask the difficult questions about the use of third-party cookies. Second, think about how those technologies and platforms work together, or if they work in isolation or in silos. Also, consider if your first-party data can be appended to those platforms or not.
Today, Google Marketing Platform is an environment that leverages your first-party site data and first-party customer data, all connected directly to the media buying platform. For more details, check out Merkle’s 2020 audience-centric Google Playbook.
Team up with a Transformation Partner
One of the common challenges marketers are experiencing comes down to the coordination of complex MarTech environment. To support this reality, Merkle has evolved the way we work and support our clients. One way we do this is by moving beyond media planning and buying as the core focal area of our engagements but elevating the support and conversations to be a business transformation partner. The required elements to make this shift are:
1) Having the subject matter expertise to be able to become that partner
2) The ability to be nimble and flexible in providing those services to advertisers.
Focus on Outcomes
Going through all of this effort should ensure there is a focus on outcomes – Below, I’ve outlined three topic areas where we’ve seen advanced customer modeling and segmentation create marketer and user benefit.
- Understanding the Customer Journey – in understanding the journey, we may be able to dynamically spot trends in users search interest changes or pathing between channels.
- Predicting marketing outcomes is where many of our customers find immense value in their digital buying, particularly around segmenting customers for purchase prediction or suppression as Emily alluded to earlier.
- Making the Customer’s Experience More Personal is critical. One example of how Merkle helped an omni-channel retailer was in changing Display media messaging to focus on in-store vs. online for select customer segments.
Want to learn more? Merkle developed the Performance Marketing Lab (PML) by organizing an innovative team of experts to help, across our performance media, analytics, and data science teams. Working together, this group is focused on ensuring the right technical foundation for your digital marketing, and then applying advanced CRM segmentation and modeling, all through productized solutions.
This group solves the difficult task of gathering the right knowledge together, focused on a clear vision. The team is completely flexible in supporting in-house teams as well as full-service agency engagements. PML has the required elements that I spoke to early, project managing our teams and our client’s teams, and filling the unique gaps and needs that exist as a business transformation partner. If you think this might be a good option for your organization, learn more about PML here.
