The New York Stock Exchange captures 1 terabyte of data during each active daily trading session. Modern vehicles are equipped with approximately 100 sensors, all of which quietly work behind-the-scenes to capture an abundance of data points on vehicle performance. Every click consumers make online adds to a massive pool of insights on consumer behavior, demographics and more. With such an abundance of big data resources available, why are marketers trying to convert customers off insights that may be months or even years old? How can the Data Exchange Platform (DXP) improve this?
The average American spends over 11 hours each day interacting with electronic media devices, which typically includes over an hour on a PC and nearly 1.5 hours on a personal smartphone device. Despite the potential for tapping into an abundance of fresh, real-time insights, many marketers aren’t using sufficiently recent data on their prospects to drive the results they want. Nearly 40% of modern marketers at major brands complain that their data resources are updated too infrequently or not real-time enough for true insights. Timeliness is a major pain point for marketers facing pressure to incorporate big data into their strategies, as well as increasingly high conversion targets for online advertising campaigns.
The culprit behind marketers’ struggle to drive ROI through advertising could be the timeliness of data resources, in addition to data quality issues. Marketers are nearly twice as likely to be actively using customer survey data that could be months or years old as they are to incorporate mobile device insights (19% utilization) or social media data (35% adoption). In an era where consumers are likely to perform self-guided product research and purchase decisions via computers or mobile devices, data that reflects recent behaviors is critical to achieving a timely response. Even the most sophisticated data-driven marketers, who source behavioral insights via a data management platform (DMP), may not be working with sufficiently fresh data resources.
Does Your DMP Include Timely Data?
The use of a DMP to merge organizational insights with purchased or rented 3rd-party data sources is a common means of targeting banner ads and customer discovery at marketing organizations. However, a lack of efficacy, results or consumer understanding can still result, even with the effective use of DMP. Why? With digital activities growing in every sphere, human behavior is changing more rapidly now than perhaps at any other time in history, according to McKinsey. Regardless of how quickly consumers are selecting tablets and mobile devices over desktop computers, consumers have always tended to make purchases within a predictable period of time.
Data on online consumer behavior collected a year ago simply has limited value to brands. Traditional DMPs offer limited quality guarantees necessary for brands to achieve sufficient conversions in highly competitive market spaces. Data quality matters, and marketers need impartial measurement of conversions before committing to a purchase of third-party insights. Just because a data vendor claims their resources claim real-time insights doesn’t mean these insights have an effective track-record of appropriately high conversion rates. Increased transparency is critical around the data purchase and integration process in order for marketers to drive successful results through big data.
Why Real-Time Data Exchange Matters
All too often, the most sophisticated marketers will attempt to drive banner conversions via data that’s simply too old to be effective, or data that offers limited insight into consumers. Exceptional marketers are able to build robust, data-driven profiles of their ideal customers. These profiles should include demographic and firmographic insights, in addition to behavioral insights. Data quality and comprehensiveness matters every bit as much as recency in optimizing for conversions.
Today’s marketers need the ability to combine real-time behavioral insights with equally-fresh data on consumer’s demographics. You can’t optimize to convert a prospect who’s completed their purchase a year ago, and you won’t win a customer who can no longer afford your product due to changes in income level. In order to affect behavior, data must be comprehensive, recent, and accurate. Anything else can lead to disappointing results.
To learn more about the benefits of the DXP, check out our recent blog DXP vs DMP: Why Real-Time Data Exchange is Critical to Customer Understanding
image credit: kamiphuc via flickr/cc
