Marketers Want to Know Who You Are: Data Collection Primary Mandate
Marketers want to know who their customers are. They’ve always wanted to know, actually, but today’s drive to digital is increasing demand on brands and advertisers to not only collect, but analyze a plethora of data on consumers and prospective customers.
In Digiday and Neustar polling conducted in June 2014, and reported at eMarketer, it was revealed that 77 percent of US digital media and marketing professionals said they had “increased their data collection process over the past year.”
The survey found that marketers were looking to better understand their customers—the most popular response, cited by 57 percent of respondents. To agglomerate this information and form better customer profiles, respondents have expanded the types of data they collect, including demographic, psychographic, and social details.
“Despite these improvements and the emphasis on linking data to create individual customer profiles, 50 percent of respondents were still struggling to integrate everything,” according to eMarketer. “And even for those who could, traditional data points such as location information and demographics were the main sources, limiting the formation of full profiles.”
Just 14 percent of marketers said they had adequate capability to create a single view of a customer. Another 40 percent said they were doing an average job at creating individual customer profiles, and fully 34 percent reported being weak in this arena.
Because so much data is now available to advertisers, marketers are being pressured to collect it, aggregate it, analyze it, and act on it. The idea is that the more a company knows about its customers, the more it can sell to them.
Marketers clearly agree with that idea. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents said that “achieving a single customer view was critical to long-term success.”
