Three Emerging Truths for Data-Driven Marketing

This week, I spoke at the World Market Trade Expo held at the CTICC, and it was great to see the venue so busy again.

I was asked to expand on the data conversation for the travel industry, and I thought I would share a few of my headline points with you.

To access data, you must have data.

The first-party data wave has been going on, and we can see that we are now entering a marketing era where if you wish to access data, you will need your own.

I’m talking about how online media giants like Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn are using API integrations into CRM systems to trigger events between your data systems and their data systems to provide us with better conversions.

A year ago, I spoke about how Google and Facebook conversion rates are declining thanks to privacy restriction laws. Well, now these APIs are finding a way to engage with businesses and provide incredibly powerful access to the massive databases of Facebook, Google, and others—in a relatively simple manner. Of course, this assumes you’re savvy enough to have your business on a CRM that handles this integration.?

I foresee more products landing on the market that will allow us to gain incredible access to data-driven value resources without needing to access the data, as long as we have the data ourselves. Engage with these platforms.

So if you haven’t yet done so, it’s time to get your CRM in order.

Your customer will assault and evade your best marketing strategy.

Customers do not want to be funnelled or fall into a channel; they dislike being segmented, don’t want to tell you how they found you, and hate completing your survey (even if you ask nicely — PS: Here's my survey, "pretty please" ).

They live in the moment, are emotional, and are erratic. Even if you create the best journey, they will butcher it, starting on one end, jumping to the middle of another journey, then back to the beginning of your competition leads funnels, then opting out of all communications, only to complain to customer service that no one replied to their messages and finally buy your product online late one Friday night.

I have clients whose customers behave and follow the journey, and I have clients whose customers will start and finish three journeys in parallel within minutes. You cannot build your marketing strategy on something as flimsy as this. I think you need a different approach.

This is where I believe we need to switch up the customer-centricity conversation a bit and start it with one important question.

What do we sell? This is the most important starting point for user journeys and content.

Then, ask why it matters to our customers and why it should matter to them; and if you’re smart, you’ve realised that I am now starting to build a customer-centric content structure for a business-focused business, not customer-focused.

And if you’re smarter, you’ll know that we can build data-trigger all over that content because, as a business, we collect data around what we sell, and we can use that to trigger unique personalised experiences for our prospects and customers.

Customers can jump all over that plan and follow any journey they like; they will always end up in the same place – ready to buy what we sell.

If they don’t, it’s because they’re not our customer.

Stop chasing customers and start chasing business.

Embrace Marketing Technology (Martech).

Finally, the data in our Insight 2024 report shows that businesses need to adopt marketing technology more to be ready to engage in a digital ecosystem efficiently.

It's becoming increasingly important to embed marketing technology into organisations for marketers to successfully engage in the digital world.

The current trend is to outsource the tech ownership to the agency. This is a wildly inefficient and small-minded approach to data and technology. Bringing the technology inhouse means you can still outsource the service, but you can monitor the work better, the data is owned by you, it can be integrated and synced into your systems, you can integrate the technology into other marketing processes to simplify and automate.

A simple case example is the Advertising API and CRM example I shared earlier. Without the right internal marketing tech, your business will be excluded from this ecosystem.?

Another example is that Google has launched AI advertising tools like PMAX for Travel Ads and specialised AI ads for the travel industry. To take part, you will need a pipeline of rates data synced to your Google Business Profile (at least, this is how the current beta works). This technology is available to many in the industry, but most have not embraced it, so they sit outside the ecosystem. Google positions itself as the future of AI Advertising.

Excited for it all

I’m excited about the shifts AI, automation, and constantly changing consumer demands are bringing to the digital marketing landscape. I believe we’re in a time when great partnerships will be formed, and we will see the digital marketing landscape evolve again, bringing more specialised fields, more sophisticated technologies, safer data infrastructure, and better customer experiences.

?It’s a good time to be in digital.