Why it’s time to end specialization and aim for better connected marketing

Does it sometimes feel like the marketing industry is all a bit… disconnected?

Our audience isn’t anything close to singular. We’ve got all sorts of customers who buy for different reasons, in different places, and in different ways. 

Even an individual customer isn’t a single entity. They behave differently on their morning commute to how they behave on a Saturday morning. They act differently depending on the weather or the time of year or how their sports team performed. 

And all of that creates a load of disconnected, noisy data. We get customer data that tells us about who are customers are and what they do. We get business data that tells us how they interact with our business. And we get media data that shows us how they respond to our advertising. 

The marketing industry has responded to this challenge with a whole host of specialized solutions designed to identify, target and influence the people buying from us. Which makes sense - but also creates its own challenge. 

Instead of asking big, exciting questions about our audience and creating smart ways to reach them, the modern marketer has to spend time choosing the right bits to add to their tech stack, picking the right data insights solutions to make sure they’re getting the information they need, and closing their skills gap so they’ve got the right team of experts to actually do all the work. 

And they have to make all those things connect too. 

Which... kinda sucks 

It’s really hard to navigate the disconnected world of customers and data. It’s even harder when the tools you use to do that are all disconnected too. It means marketers are….

• Missing out on opportunities they can’t even see.
• Wasting money reaching the wrong people just to reach the right ones.
• Losing sleep trying to hammer a square-peg CRM into a round-hole trading desk using a predictive analytics screwdriver. 

(You see what disconnected marketing does? It produces metaphors like that.)

Good news - there’s a better way

We think marketing works better when it’s connected. That’s why we think the focus shouldn’t be on specialization, it should be about bringing all capabilities you need together in one place so you can identify, target, and influence your best consumers in a way that makes it easy. 

So, whatever your media challenge - whether it’s increasing reach, growing awareness, driving footfall or whatever - you can build a connected solution that works to solve exactly that problem. 

Here’s how it works

Connecting the right data

First, it’s all about connecting the right data streams. Whatever data sources you need - customer, online, media consumption, screens and devices, real world, location and so on - you need them all to be one place so you can choose the ones that are going to reveal the most important things you need to know about your audience, and connect them all together. 

Uncovering practical analytic insights

Once that’s done, you need a team of super smart data scientists and analysts to jump into the connected data to pull out the insights you need to meet your specific business challenges. General insights don’t cut it. If you want to know about competitor conquesting, you need insights that are going to help you do it. Same goes for audience segmentation, lifetime analysis, online user journeys or predictive analytics.

That means you need access to a team of analysts, data scientists, and engineers who have the flexibility and expertise to develop specific insights for what you need. 

Turning the insights into activations

Insights are no good unless you put them to use. So, you also need expert traders who work shoulder to shoulder with the analytics team to seamlessly turn the insights they uncover into media activations that meet your business challenge in the DSPs where you’re going to drive most value.

Measure it

Oh, and the last, last step. You need to prove all your better connected marketing is working. That means you need measurement tools to look at things like incrementally, attribution model ingestion, store visitation and brand lift baked into your custom media solution - so when you’re asking the CFO for more budget, you’ve got the facts and figures at your fingertips to demonstrate ROI. 

It just makes sense

It’s kind of obvious. It’s much easier to reach the customers you want when the solutions you use to do it are all working together. Specialization made sense in the early days of Big Data marketing - but now it’s time to do things in a smarter way that gets better results, more efficiently. That’s why we think better connected marketing is the future.

Find out more about better connected marketing here.