The importance of personalized customer interaction is becoming far more pronounced among today’s B2B marketers: this is called 1:1 marketing. Smart marketers need to shift our gaze from big data and metrics to creating 1:1 relationships that leverage mining of better and more meaningful data. This is where “little data” comes into the picture. While big data in all its colossal capacity, may leave you feeling lost, the little data is what matters here.
Big data – what it tells you and why you should go beyond it
With the amount of data multiplying at pretty much the speed of sound with every passing day, more and more companies feel challenged in their data curation efforts. Extracting the relevant data from this huge mass of information is difficult, time-consuming, and downright taxing. Also, big data contains valuable information that goes beyond just customer acquisition and sales to touch the new business KPIs I’ve discussed in an earlier post in this column: Beyond Sales, the Business KPIs of Marketing,
However, for marketers to consume the relevant info, breaking down the big data into small, bite-sized bits is important – this is “small data” and perhaps the most important data from the marketer’s point-of-view. Why? Because it allows you to use the data for 1:1 marketing pursuits.
1:1 relationships –the next big wave in B2B marketing
1:1 marketing is defining the bottom line of today’s B2B marketing goals. Focusing on individual engagement works because you get the data from single entities and not groups, which allows you to fine tune your marketing strategies much more effectively. 1:1 marketing is a great indicator of customer behaviour, their purchase trends, and the post-purchase evaluation. This is the the data a marketer should be looking at in an effort to create more impacted sales and marketing strategies.
Omni-Channel marketing makes way for 1:1 experiences
Omni-channel is the new way to measure customer engagement across multiple channels or platforms. But it’s not just any other passing trend. This concept is especially going to help marketers today when mobile usage is high and growing by leaps and bounds. Since more and more customers are carrying out purchases through multiple devices, it’s critical for marketers to be able to capture and evaluate customer behaviour and experience across these devices. Omni-channel marketing is all about 1:1 experiences across the every-increasing spectrum of devices that customers use.
Omni-channel marketing is making it possible to track customer engagement levels while they are interacting with a company through different channels. For instance, a customer might click through to an email, browse through a company’s website, visit their online store, follow them on social media channels or follow a link shared in social, engage in live chat on their website, or go totally old school and give them a call. These activities again might be split into small durations on various device platforms like desktop, mobile or smartphone. As a marketer, you should want to know what they’re doing and what devices and channels they’re using each step of the way. That’s how you can truly understand the customer experience an integreated marketing strategy that can work seamlessly on all these platforms. This is omni-channel marketing and why it’s so important.
In today’s B2B marketing world, personalization of customer data will let marketers build actionable strategies. After the data is filtered and presented in a consumable way, the marketers can use it optimally to create winning plans that will drive better sales and give them bigger returns on investment.
Image: Creative Commons
This post was first published on Forbes and can be found here.
Daniel Newman is the Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise. From Big Data to IoT to Cloud Computing, Newman makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology projects, which leads to his ideas regularly being cited in CIO.Com, CIO Review and hundreds of other sites across the world. A 5x Best Selling Author including his most recent “Building Dragons: Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy,” Daniel is also a Forbes, Entrepreneur and Huffington Post Contributor. MBA and Graduate Adjunct Professor, Daniel Newman is a Chicago Native and his speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.