By Jon Baron, CEO and Co-Founder, TagMan
We have come a long way in digital marketing since the 90’s. Marketers are moving away from measuring performance of campaigns by the last click and are starting to integrate their marketing mix. In order to achieve this, marketers need to break down their data silos across the board and connect the dots to improve targeting so they can better reach the right person at the right time with the right message.
With more systems online, and more ways to collect and analyze data, modern marketers have a wealth of possibilities to access and connect. However, that can be a tumultuous undertaking. Without the option to pass data across your systems, data connectivity becomes a challenge. Marketers are left with an incomplete view of their customers and their experiences from each data silo such as display, email, social and mobile app data, CRM systems and web analytics.
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Without the ability to quickly access unified data, marketers are operating shorthanded and can miss out on key insights that could optimize campaigns. It is extremely difficult for marketers to get a comprehensive view of their digital marketing efforts when all of their data is so fragmented. Tag management and attribution systems can help create a more unified view of their customer data and show you how the different channels work together.
By being able to access all of this data in one convenient and unified platform, marketers can now take a comprehensive look at their marketing efforts and extract stronger insights than they would have from the piecemeal approach. This also saves considerable time and resources, thus increasing ROI and making marketing efforts considerably more efficient.
Global airline Air New Zealand used TagMan’s platform to change their marketing efforts into a single view of their data across every channel, which in turn made it possible to raise their revenues by 15%.
A key benefit of this more integrated approach to digital marketing is less reliance on the “last click” method of attribution. In the past, marketers have relied on the last click before a sale or conversion was made in order to give credit and report on channel effectiveness. By using an integrated Marketing Data Platform, marketers can instead see every touch point that contributed to the sale.
Brands and retailers need to build up their reputation and reach a certain level of fame in order for consumers to hear about them. The last click method, despite its benefits in the early days of digital marketing, does not provide a full, comprehensive picture of how a consumer first discovered a particular brand or interacted with the brand in the past. While the last click method does shed some light on certain successful aspects of digital marketing, it does not show anywhere near the full picture, causing brand marketers to miss extremely valuable insights, and oftentimes undervalue otherwise valuable channels.
Instead of relying on the narrow-sighted and now antiquated last click method, marketers can now fully understand how a consumer first learned about the brand, including which search terms they used, whether they “liked” it on social media, and which ads they saw. As you can see from the wealth of data this incorporates, marketers armed with this information have a much better chance at setting their brand up for success.
The future of digital marketing will be devoid of data silos and based around data connectivity that delivers richer customer and campaign analytics, smarter targeting and deeper personalization. The ability to combine what is otherwise siloed consumer data forms the foundation of dynamic, data-activated marketing.
Data unification gives marketers the ability to track customers’ entire marketing experience on any device across channels, and activate and share data for campaign optimization, personalization and an improved site experience. In the end, this will achieve more efficient marketing and wider reach for brands.
As CEO and Co-Founder of TagMan, Jon Baron is responsible globally for the company’s vision, strategy and growth. Baron is a veteran in the digital media industry, with his career beginning in 1997 as an early member of the IAB, running networking events and working for pioneering Internet publishers before moving to the global player MSN. He spent 10 years at Microsoft creating and building MSN’s first multi-national sales teams for the US, EMEA and Asia. After Microsoft, he joined hypertext and rich-media ad network Vibrant Media as VP of International Sales, where he built out the international and ad-exchange capabilities.
