The Human Side of Data: How Wearables are Flipping the Personalization Conversation
Marketers know they need to be using data. IBM did a survey recently, and found that almost 90% of marketers agree that personalizing the customer experience is critical to their success. Despite this widespread agreement, nearly 80% of consumers stated that the average brand doesn’t understand them as an individual.
Data is a huge priority for marketers and personalization is key to keeping consumers loyal, engaged, and buying. And we have oodles of data. So what’s really going on here? Why aren’t marketers more successful with data marketing?
Using the data to get more precise
Data tells the story of a consumer, and aggregate data gives us pictures of groups within our market. We can segment our market based on data points, and prioritize groups for targeting. We can plan messages and marketing that fits each segment and put them into action.
Let’s say for example you’re Home Depot. You have pretty well defined segments in your market, and you know that empty nesters in the Midwest who make more than $100K a year historically stock up pretty heavily on gardening supplies come May. You ready all your marketing material to launch to that group. But what if you knew that half that group is highly active, and half that group is pretty sedentary? Would it make sense then to narrow your discounted shovels and 40 pound bags of mulch to that healthier, more active sect?
What does it take to get there?
If you take inventory of your existing customer data, you may realize you don’t have the data points you need to reach the heightened state of relevancy consumers demand today. Two trends are allowing us to get closer to consumers:
1) Consumers are more and more willing to part with their data when it benefits them.
2) Sensor-laden smartphones, wearables and connected devices are increasing the types of data points available to consumers and marketers.
To get to the root of relevancy, marketers have to entice consumers to share the most valuable data points that will allow them to market more precisely, cement customer trust and loyalty by providing relevant marketing once they have that data, and then continually iterate their efforts based on that data, learning and getting better and better.
Not all the data, just the right data.
Wearables like the Apple Watch, Fitbit, Jawbone Up, Pebble Time and Android Wear are predicted to be a billion dollar market by 2018. Data exhausting from wearables is different than any other data we’ve encountered in marketing. Marketers now have access to steps, movement, sleep, food data and more. With human data we can better understand how customers live, not just where they are and what they happen to like on Facebook.
Layer in human data
Human data tells a story on it’s own, but it is even more valuable when layered onto your existing customer data. Human data allows you to take your analysis to a deeper level. For the simplest use case layer on human data to segment your healthiest customers and market your healthiest brands to them. If you want to get a little deeper, take your online video advertising impression data and combine it with human data and drill down to a new segment: sedentary binge watchers who are most likely to see your online video advertising. How can your brand be relevant to those people in that instant?
The more data we have the more interesting and relevant use cases we can come up with. On May 18th I’ll be on a panel at Incite Summit: West with Jesse Nichols from Google Analytics and Paul Walsh, VP of Weather Analytics at The Weather Company to drill down deeper into this topic on a panel titled, ‘Be more precise: Target and tailor your messages with data-driven insight.’