“The customer journey is not siloed.”
Dan Taylor, Global Managing Director, Global Display & Programmatic for Google, Inc. started his keynote presentation with some hard truths about the problems with channel marketing.
Marketing companies have been gathering, collecting, and deciphering data for years trying to understand consumer behaviors. This is all well in good, except most of the data is kept in siloed verticals, as well as marketing budgets. Radio listener data is kept in its column with its budget, print media in its column with its budget, the online team with the website keeps their information and tries to take more budget from maybe the mobile department, and all of this chaos causes internal siloes and adversarial marketing teams.
“Most people move seamlessly between devices; however, most marketers don’t measure that way.”
It isn’t news that the consumer’s journey may take multiple touch points across multiple devices and media, but most marketing teams don’t approach the consumer experience from a cohesive approach that would solidify a brand’s message to that consumer. Sometimes, even worse, they misinterpret the consumer’s intent, and send the wrong message and lose the customer. How can a company use machine learning to better understand customer intent, and make a more cohesive marketing plan?
The first half of the keynote sets up Taylor to introduce the second half of his keynote topic which is to talk about Google customers that take advantage of understanding path to purchase, taking advantage of data signals, understanding how to apply it to their digital marketing, and what they’re doing differently to drive organizational change and results for their business.
Taylor says there are 3 things to move forward.
- Organizations are moving from a channel-first strategy to one centered around the customer.
- Google customers are using intelligence to drive better marketing results.
- How are we using digital to develop and nurture those consumer relationships over time?
In the old channel focused marketing model, as hinted at before, often marketing is segregated into channels and often those channels will even compete for the same budget. Leading marketers are connecting their teams by bringing together the data from across all channels so that they are all “speaking the same language” and creating incentives for the whole marketing group to work together. Google has found that organizations that leverage customer behavioral data while working together outperform their peers by 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margin. For example, Home Depot now has one marketing team cross channel execution and strong attribution of their marketing efforts by using Google’s online-to-offline solutions which connected the online-to-instore purchase data. Home Depot saw a return of investment on Google tools with an 8-times increase of mobile-to-instore purchase. When Home Depot added Google location tools to their app and better nurtured the Home Depot-customer relationship by better showing relevant items, purchases increased further.
After the first purchase, it has been found that nurturing current customers is more profitable than going after new customers. Marketers need to ask themselves how they’re using their digital media to improve and sustain the relationship with their best customers, which are their current customers, and are you using those insights and applying them to digital marketing?
Taylor asked the audience to go back to their teams for the remaining days at Advertising Week Asia and engage their Google partners with the questions:
- How are you putting the customer first, organizationally?
- How can you use audience data and scale it through machine learning?
- Are you using digital marketing as a means to nurture and continue your relationships with your current customers?