In a data driven world, you live and die by
the quality of your data…simple as that. Which is why there is a massive shift
taking place in the ad tech marketplace right now, as CRM and paid media
converge. Traditional CRM players (Oracle, Salesforce, IBM etc…) are now
making aggressive moves to integrate paid media offerings as part of their
overall solution.
Wait…what? CRM companies want to get into the
paid media business? Most of us have been trained over the years to think of
display & paid media as a purely branding focused, awareness driving…top of
the funnel stuff. But guess what…it’s not. The rise of programmatic buying has
lead to greater efficiency, targeting & reach for advertisers. Which
translates into paid media actually being used successfully for direct response
& performance based advertising. So it stands to reason that if paid media
can be used to drive conversions you might as well target the people you know
have a much higher likelihood of converting – your customers!
The limitation of email marketing has always
been the fact that only a small percentage of your overall customer file will
ever actually open your message. And the only real solution was to send more
email…until now that is. We are now witnessing the intersection of paid media
and CRM. As Bizo’s Russ Glass points out in this AllThingsD
article – at the core of the data driven marketing revolution is the CRM
database:
“With the CRM system as the
system of record, seamlessly connecting all of the marketing systems in an
enterprise, executing programs and then measuring success becomes possible —
once the right data can be plugged in.”
And what is the data driven marketing
revolution you ask? Well at LiveIntent we’d probably say it’s the ability to
reach your subscribers everywhere…on the web, mobile, video, social etc…Because
if I’m Walmart and I know that 80% of my email offers are going unread, I want
to reach my subscribers, with my offer, anywhere and everywhere they are.
And how do you reach your subscribers
everywhere? Email of course! Email is the only identifier that can be used to
target offline CRM data, online. Which is why the CRM piece of the new ad stack is
becoming so critical. Nothing beats first party data…as shown by Facebook,
eBay, Amazon and perhaps now Twitter all creating advertising solutions that
leverage their treasure trove of 1st Party CRM data. And now
advertisers have the ability to use their own 1st Party CRM data to
create addressable audience segments. It’s a 1st Party – Party!
In 2011 Forrester said that we are now living
in the “Age of the Customer” – which meant putting the customer at the center
of your business was required in order to compete in todays world. In another
Forrester research piece titled “Embed The Customer Life Cycle AcrossMarketing”, Forrester says the following:
“By investing additional spend on retention
marketing to increase share of wallet with existing customers, marketers are
placing their money on a much surer bet – the
people who have already demonstrated some level of affinity for the product or
brand – than an indiscriminate cast out to the wider pool of potential
shoppers or buyer.”
That just about sums it all up! Today’s
landscape is extremely fragmented, with customers interacting with brands
across multiple channels and now devices. If you’re going to invest in getting
your existing customers to spend more of their dollars with your brand, you’re
going to need to reach them everywhere. Putting your CRM database at the center
of your ad stack enables brands/marketers to achieve this. A recent AdExchanger article highlighting Valueclick's Dotomi business summed it up
perfectly:
"Hello paid
media, you're in the CRM business now."
