Tealium’s Digital Velocity conference included keynote speakers from all over the world—both Tealium employees and other industry experts. The conference discussed how Tealium products can bring solutions to complex customer data challenges, tips on keeping your customer data organized and clean, breakthrough digital marketing tactics, and maximizing the customer experience and personalization.
As the Zion & Zion team continuously looks for opportunities to enhance and build our clients digital marketing efforts, this conference provided some great insight on upcoming industry trends and capabilities within the Tealium suite of products. The “Modernizing Digital Marketing” portion of the conference had a few topics extremely relevant to the current marketing environment and how COVID-19 has shifted the expectations of customers, as well as how us as marketers can set up our clients brands for success moving forward. The session specifically dedicated to talking about this coined it “The Next Normal.”
Precision Growth & Human Experience is the Next Normal
One big learning that came was the idea that in the current marketing environment, it is not about MORE data, it is more about the insights and efficiency that can be gained from that data. There is a big push across the industry for looking at the quality of data about your customers over just quantity. This is where the implementation of a sophisticated CDP like Tealium, can be leveraged. Tealium is a great tool when looking to connect not just the actions of users on your site but mapping these actions back to known users and utilizing those attributes to build custom audiences and create unique messaging to customers across all devices and channels.
The “Next Normal” as mentioned, is the coined phrase speakers used when referring to the current state of the business marketing and advertising today. This is based on three core ideas: a complete shift to digital, more demand for insights/efficiency from data, and companies than can deliver will thrive.
Complete Shift to Digital
Digital transformation is not optional. Increased working from home, virtual events, and day to day communications has increased the need for a strong digital infrastructure across businesses. The need for businesses to secure and manage data virtually has increased significantly. One big call out was that “digital alone is not sufficient,” which is HUGE coming from a digital powerhouse company like Tealium. The key message in this, is that although the shift to digital for businesses and consumers is undeniable, thinking about how to use data and provide customers with end-to-end brand experience at all touchpoints will inevitable still incorporate offline experiences as well.
More Demand on Insights and Efficiency from Data
As the amount of data available increases, the need to understand what is important and the analysis to draw insights from it becomes key. The need to ensure data protection and privacy is an ever-growing focus as customer’s concern over their data increases. As marketers, we are tasked with evaluating the available data and using that to find valuable insights about how to best reach and communicate with our customers. Additionally, there is a need for the data to gain business efficiency. This can be done by the ability to optimize spend quickly, reach users in real-time, and be able to predict demand or anticipate opportunities. Siloed data has a cost to business, and not generating insights or gaining efficiency is a waste of all that valuable customer data.
Companies that Can Deliver will Thrive
To innovate today, you need to understand your customer through data. The stat they shared of “73% of people point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions” shows just how important it is for businesses to not just reach people, but ensure they follow their journey and the brand is showcasing the best experience at every step. In order to be a company that thrives, it is important to have be tuned into your customer. The next speaker went into detail about how to do this using the “five principles of dynamic marketing.”
Five Key Principles of Dynamic Marketing
To be “tuned in” to your customers, the speaker for this session outlined the five key principles when thinking about not only how to reach customers (the buyer) but to understand them. The need to create relevant experiences based on a dynamic environment is the idea that you need to reach people in a way that feels personal to them, across all different channels, in a uniformed brand message. This can be done using the below acronym shared for how to be “tuned in” to your customers:
- Trust: Buyers expect a trusted experience and their preferences to be upheld.
- Unified: Buyers require a relevant experience, which depends on unified customer data.
- Now: Buyers expect experiences to be in the moment and accurate, data needs to be real-time.
- Everywhere: Buyers require a relevant and consistent experience across channels.
- Delight: Buyers expect businesses to know them—you need to be able to predict optimal experiences.
How do we make it useful for us as a business?
The customers of your brand want a holistic, seamless, and personal feel to their experience. A disjointed experience can be as simple as a person seeing a different message on their mobile device than an email they receive from a business. This is again where using a CDP, like Tealium, can help to build a customer experience based on unified data across all channels and touchpoints they interact with. The second piece to that is creating the experience in real-time, when a user is ready to take an action or learn more about your brand. The image below shows an example of how limited data, or disconnected data, will not give us enough of the holistic view to be tuned into our customers.
Finding Growth in the Next Normal
Due to dramatic shifts in consumer behavior, businesses need to quickly adapt to the “next normal.” The path for this is different for every brand and industry, but some will thrive when they learn how to create a relevant customer experience based on a dynamic environment.
How can you make sure you’re gathering the right data and the data the is useful for our business? One big way is using a CDP, like Tealium, that can make sure you are complaint with global regulatory standards and have an overarching view of your marketing initiatives. Finally, its time to not just collect data and innovate, but to understand the customer you are communicating with.