Solving the Multi-channel Conundrum: How to Leverage Your Marketing Data for Success

Who are you really marketing to? It may sound like a crazy question, but it’s increasingly difficult for marketers to answer these days. 

Prospects and customers can no longer be seen as having a single customer journey. They exist, operate, and interact with brands on multiple platforms, devices, and channels.

More than 60% of UK adults online use two or more devices daily.

Not only do you have different customers and prospects interacting in different places, but also the same customer’s preferences and interactions can alter, depending on the device or channel they are using at the time. What’s more, over 40% of online adults start activities on one device and finish on another!

Gathering data and insights from the various points of contact is essential if you’re going to understand and contextualise your audience and their preferences. 

This is why marketers are turning to data management platforms to help make sense of the multifaceted customer identities we see today.

The Multi-channel Conundrum

Simply put, how do you understand who your customer is and market effectively to them in a world of fragmented customer journeys, multiple channels, and different devices?

Creating a multi-channel marketing strategy raises key challenges:

Matching customer identities across channels

The average enterprise-level business is using some 500 different applications, which is a recipe for duplication of data, particularly if the data is being stored in archaic systems like spreadsheets, which don’t talk to each other.

To avoid counting the same customer twice, marketers need to be able to identify each person across multiple channels, all the while negotiating data security.

Dealing with data silos

Another issue with big data is that it can end up in different departmental silos - the sales database, the customer service database, the marketing database…

There is near universal consensus that this is holding us back. 97% of executives said that organisational silos have a negative effect.

What modern marketers need is a unified overview of each customer, rather than a fragmented picture.

Lack of alignment between cross-functional teams

One consequence of the multi-channel conundrum is that online campaigns are increasingly involving different teams, with marketers managing cross-functional activity.

This is a positive step and can lead to highly effective collaboration. which can result in duplicate or inaccurate data inputs.

Inconsistent/Incomplete audience profiles

B2B marketers are very good at collecting the traditional bits of data – job role, location, and so on.

The digital footprint of all your prospects needs to be taken into account more widely.

What are their search, social, and mobile behaviours? How do they access and interact with content? Lack of data quality and completeness is cited by 54% of companies as their biggest challenge to data-driven marketing success.

How to leverage your data and solve the multi-channel conundrum

Data management platforms are the answer. Instead of trying to reach more customers by running more and more cross-channel campaigns, be more intelligent and effective about how you reach your existing database.

What is a data management system?

“A data management platform (DMP) combines online and offline data from first-party proprietary systems, and second-party and third-party audiences to provide marketers with a central platform that stores and helps provide insight regarding audience and campaign data that is used for optimizing campaigns and media spend across channels.”

Data Management Platforms (Frost & Sullivan)

So a DMP helps marketers to build more complete customer profiles by bringing together information from a whole host of different sources.

This in turn allows much more hyper-targeting and intelligent marketing based on deep and accurate customer insights. Small wonder that 48% of media sellers are already using DMPs.

Let’s take another look at the challenges discussed previously, and how a DMP can solve them:

Matching customer identities across multiple channels

Data management platforms both ingest old data and collect new.

This can include CRM insights and integration of third party data when appropriate.

The system pulls all the disparate information together and matches it to the prospect/customer concerned.

It uses attributes like device and cookie IDs to identify each single customer. 

Dealing with data silos

Sweep away the silos and use your data management platform as the central hub of information about customers and prospects.

The value of having a single, complete data centre cannot be overestimated.

Lack of alignment between cross-functional teams

Closely tied to the above, DMPs allow marketers to accurately identify and target prospects from a wide pool, secure in the knowledge that the data is unified and aligned.

With one master source of information to work from , all cross-channel teams are effectively singing from the same hymn-sheet.

Inconsistent/Incomplete audience profiles

The digital age requires much deeper customer knowledge than simple demographic data or job role information.

DMPs are able to analyse and segment audiences by digital behaviours and attributes. This level of targeting greatly improves the effectiveness of campaigns.

It’s been estimated that segmented campaigns can cause a 750% increase in revenue.

Solving the Multi-channel Conundrum

In the fast-moving, fragmented, multi-channel world of modern marketing, the single linear customer journey is a thing of the past.

The challenge for marketers is now to find ways of getting to know each customer as an individual despite the multi-faceted nature of interactions and the proliferation of different channels and devices.

Data management platforms act as a centralising, unifying hub for data, bringing order from the chaos of big data, duplication and silos.

The DMP has become one of every modern marketer’s most essential tools.

Main Takeaways

• Prospects and customers can no longer be seen as having a single customer journey. 
• Marketers need to understand who the customer is and market effectively to them in a world of fragmented customer journeys, multiple channels and different devices
• Multi-channel marketing raises key challenges like matching customer identities, overcoming data silos and aligning cross-functional teams
• Data management systems helps marketers to build more complete customer profiles by bringing together information from a whole host of different sources

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