October 15, 2014
It sounds bizarre, but it’s predicted that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on technology than the technology officer will. (Gartner.)
Following on our post on the coming age of Social Intelligence, data-driven marketing is here to stay, and many marketers are finding it difficult to cope.
Landing your content into the social feed of consumers is set to become ever more difficult. As the quantity (and quality) of marketed content proliferates across social, and as consumer’s attention spans shorten with each year, finding that “goldilocks zone” of content consumption is going to become your Holy Grail.
That Holy Grail is data – and there’s lots of it. Not surprisingly, it’s the Technology and Retail sectors who have aggressively pursued big data content marketing first, where data-driven publishing accounts for up to 90% of posts across platforms. Compare that to less than 50% in Media and Entertainment companies, where traditional scheduled posting still maintains a firm following – you’ll see there’s a big divide coming in the world of digital marketing. With studies showing that data-driven posts yield up to 91% greater reach (and 25% over scheduled) – it’s becoming clearer that data is now the next big thing the modern marketers needs in their repertoire.
The breakdown of traditional marketing isn’t pretty, but it is necessary. It’s a revolutionary shift toward a consumer-centric approach, the 1-to-1 model increasingly demanded by the constantly-connected consumer, who whilst curating their own lives online, expects the marketer to curate in real time, to them. With only 13% of consumers* agreeing that the ads they see online are relevant to them, and even less finding direct mail/email marketing aligned to their needs, there is massive room (need) for social intelligence to take over and fill that “poignancy-void.”
The transition to a big-data approach has its own pain-points, and not just because every employee probably doesn’t have a history in analytics. Any switch in company infrastructure takes time and money, not to mention reluctance to divest traditional marketing, and the hard-fought battle in changing attitudes towards in adopting the big 4 key habits – Data, testing, optimization and analytics. Intercollegiate marketers – those who engage other departments to leverage skills they don’t possess – perform the best. According to Adobe, the top 20% of digital marketers engage other departments when tackling the increasing amounts of consumer-generated data.
If you think data is complicated right now, you’re going to revaluate your idea of “complicated” in the next few years. Big data is here to stay, and the modern marketer can either ride the wave or start swimming.
Forrester Research Inc*
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