SMX Milan kicked off with a keynote from Jim Sterne highlighting data collected through various points or a user journey and how to analyse that data.
Moderator:
Sean Carlos, President, Antezeta (@seancarlos)
Speakers:
- Jim Sterne, Founder, Digital Analytics Association (@jimsterne)
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half“. – John Wanamaker
Before computers and/or internet, advertisers had a tough time optimizing their campaigns as well as knowing where and how to invest their money as effectively as possible. Later, with computers, companies could start segmenting their audience a lot more by storing results from e.g. brochure tests which then made them able to created segments for; reach, frequency and awareness.
As a marketer your job is to help the customer find what they’re looking for. In this day and age there are so many touch points; search (both paid and organic), display, social, email marketing, newsletter ads, social media, various devices etc. and keeping up with all these trends has become increasingly harder.
How do we deal with all of these different touch points? – the answer; with Big Data. Big Data comes from; Demographic data, Psychographic data, Marketplace data, Direct Marketing Metrics, Customer Analytics (CRM), Sales Force Automation Data, Call Centre Data, Web Analytics, Ad Network data, Social Media Metrics and more. In other words as a marketer you have to manage; volume, variety and velocity.
Once you acquire all this data you have to make sense of it – ie, be able to take the data and create and tell stories with it. Once you’re able to tell these stories you’ll be able to communicate better with your potential and/or existing customers which in return creates more business for you and your clients.
But how can you tell these stories using all this data? Well, with analysts. Today, marketers have to become analysts in order to keep up with all of the data, and to become an effective analyst (or a data detective) one needs to be able to look for anomalies, segment effectively (don’t tread all users the same) and reason backwards to name a few. On top of this Jim mentions four key things marketers need to keep in mind with regards to customers;
- Remember them
- Listen to them
- Work with them
- Make their life easier
To recap Jim’s keynote
- The evolution of marketing is “data detective”. The person that will take the raw data, make sense of it and make it actionable/profitable.
- As a marketer you’re responsible for various different touch points that are made on different devices
- Master the art of communication, create stories with your data to make it more actionable
- Think about your website from a customer’s perspective; make it easy to find, easy to navigate, easy to get answers from and f course easy to buy from.
