Marketing Data Revealed 1.0

by | Apr 15, 2018 | Marketing


Photo Credit: Pexels.com – Kevin Ku – CC0 License

It’s no secret that marketing is all about reaching the right customers with the right message at the right time. Marketers want to know more about their audience than ever before, and the secret sauce to reach that audience most effectively is data and lots of it— right? Well, not so fast.

Data is very important, don’t get me wrong. There has been a seismic shift in the type, volume, methods, speed of delivery and display in the past few years. This shift doesn’t have an official name… at least not yet anyway. But it did have a name that may not be as relevant as it once was. We’ll touch on that in a moment. Regardless of the name, type of data or even the method, brands and marketers want and need advanced data and information to help them capture a clearer, more well-rounded view of the customers interested in their brand and product suite. Let’s dive in.

Big Data

If you’re interested in how big data has transformed our lives personally and professionally, you’ve probably heard this term a million times over the past 10 years and understand it… at least from a ten-thousand-foot level anyway. Did you know the concept of big data is much older than 10 years? Forbes Contributor Gil Press suggests the concept of big data first broke onto the scene around the time of WWII (1941). I would never have guessed that. After reading through a timeline of how it evolved, it makes total sense; it’s quite fascinating. Now, fast forward to 2008-2010, nearly 70 years later. Big data is the rage and has already evolved from the latest trend to go far beyond what most of us could have imagined and has taken the tech world by storm and every industry around the globe. Yes, big data was the name we were just referring to. It was a label given to define volumes of data. After all, there was lots of it so what better name than big data? For marketers, the goal of this data is to gather a perfect view of the customer, their behaviors and buying patterns. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

“Big data is a term that describes the large volume of data – both structured and unstructured – that inundates a business on a day-to-day basis. But it’s not the amount of data that’s important. It’s what organizations do with the data that matters. Big data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves.” – SAS.com

Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Intent

As customer data becomes increasingly more available to even the smallest of businesses, managers of brands and marketing departments are trying to figure out how to read the vast quantities of data, translate it and create actionable initiatives by using those insights. Not an easy task. If we add Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to the mix, it gets even tougher. Marketers know that 100% of marketing cannot be attributed to the bottom line. Is there another way to get more information that will help us be more effective and understand how ROI can be directly impacted? Maybe Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) needs more attention. What exactly is it anyway?

“CLV is the total worth of a customer to a business over the entirety of their relationship.”   – eConsultancy

Let’s dive in a little deeper, wider and more introspectively. Unlike the latest trends in big data over the last 5-8 years, CLV has been around a while and has been a common business metric, especially for maturing businesses potentially looking toward an exit strategy. CLV can also be helpful for marketers as this information can translate closely to marketing persona profiles. Hmm… What happens when the all-important marketing persona profile information and customer lifetime value data come together? I believe this combined data set may create a powerful user profile that delivers profitable results.

I know this isn’t really powerful big data, however, the combination of these two critical aspects of business and marketing could deliver deeper insights if businesses figure out how to harness data merging and assimilation of these two data sets specifically. This is powerful stuff! In my opinion, CLV and persona profiles together are similar to what we today call customer intent; only intent has more powerful algorithms attached to it through mobile touch points, online sessions, page views, purchase behavior and thousands of repeat actions online. Wow!

“Marketers who rely only on demographics to reach consumers risk missing more than 70% of potential mobile shoppers. Why? Because demographics rarely tell the whole story. Understanding consumer intent is much more powerful.”  – Lisa Gevelber, Google’s VP of Global Marketing

Allen Finn of Searchengineland says “Google has something specifically called Custom Intent Audiences which offer advertisers the opportunity to use the GDN to find people who want to buy the specific products you offer — based on data from your campaigns, website and YouTube channel.” If you’re not sold on customer intent yet, you better get on board because it’s the real deal.

LSI Keywords Data

Marketers are tuned-in on understanding keywords that relate to our digital properties. As brands focus even more on digital, keywords become critical, especially in Web, search, display, remarketing, social, mobile search, online forms, live chat, phone call recording and so much more. You get the idea, keywords are rather important. Not just the short tail, but also the long tail and conversational keywords for voice-activated Siri searches. But let’s take a quick look at Latent Sematic Indexing (LSI). If you’re not sure if it’s valuable or not, let’s just say it’s part of the Google algorithm. Enough said.

“LSI keywords are words or phrases that are semantically related to each other. They are not limited to synonyms or keywords with similar meanings.” -TheContentWrangler

The value of LSI keywords can be explained like this. If you are trying to give your friend directions to a location they are not real familiar with what do you do? You start thinking of other things that may trigger their memory and use other words similar to what you are trying to explain. Finally, they understand and say, “oh yeah, I know where that is.” That is just how an LSI keyword works because it helps Google get the real meaning of the content that is on your website. Akshay Hallur from GoBloggingTips says; “LSI keywords are the keywords that are semantically related to the keyword you are searching for.”

In 2018, big data, customer lifetime value, intent and LSI keywords are still very important. Their usage continues to evolve to go even deeper by providing us with advanced profiling, forecasting, and machine-based learning data to name just a few. I’m no data scientist, but there’s a lot more to this than what I just mentioned so you’ll have to come back for Marketing Data Revealed 2.0 when we take a look at a few more known methods of advanced data usage and delivery. Because I’m a marketer, I always try to tie this all back to what it means to me in the marketing world. Stay tuned for our next blog which will talk about Lead scoring, AI, Predictive Analytics and IoT.

Scott MacFarland is a lifelong marketer with a passion for content, marketing, digital, social, web, video, analytics, and all things that lead to successful conversions. Scott is currently the Marketing Director for HMY Yachts in Jupiter, Florida.

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Photo Credit: Pexels.com – Kevin Ku – CC0 License https://www.pexels.com/photo/coding-computer-data-depth-of-field-577585/

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