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Segmentation insights

MM: If I understand you right, Trae — the first order of business is really to develop some segmentation insights.

Right.

That entails building or acquiring a clean, enriched database of households or businesses. Then using that as one version of the customer truth — or one version of the market truth, anyway. Then mapping all of this irregular — although real — data from our existing data sources to this customer master.

Exactly.

MM: Then as a function of that, once we’ve established the notion of a customer, a buyer and a stakeholder that’s part of that overall buying organization — be it a household or a business. Then we can start to lay in additional sets of data — vis-à-vis — web analytics or e-mail messaging analytics and so on — so as to make that overall customer profile clearer and clearer. Or, as you said, the fingerprint goes from a partial now to a fully-developed fingerprint, in terms of who this individual is.

Exactly. That’s exactly right.

About multichannel marketing analytics

MM: Before we get into the e-mail messaging and personalized messaging like that, I’d like you to talk to us a little bit about the notion of multichannel marketing analytics. Specifically speak to some of the web analytics that are now coming into this overall customer insight. Search analytics. Social media analytics. And perhaps even voice-of-the-customer content analytics.

Absolutely.

Again, as you know, that’s where I think just philosophically, we align so well with Alterian. One of the things that we’re so excited about in terms of the technology that they’re developing is that alignment.

I think that again — back to this idea of tracking consumer engagement. Everybody knows and has known forever now that… Allow me to just step into “social” for a second. Everybody knows that word-of-mouth is real. It has been real for a long time. Marketers have known that.

But how, historically, do you leverage that or are you even aware of that? It’s very, very spotty — at best. So much so that traditional word-of-mouth efforts have been very limited in scope, typically. Their measurability is highly questionable.

But the exciting thing about social, for example, is that now that’s happening increasingly online. It’s happening in a context where it can be… Depending on the exact execution, understood — listened to — tracked — even controlled, in some cases.

Again, back to that philosophy of data-agnosticism. I don’t just mean purchase data — third-party data — I even mean target-based views. Channels, agnostically. In the sense that, “How can they help us understand the consumer better?”

We certainly need to realize that, “This came from Channel A, and this came from Channel B.” But it’s just…

MySpace gave WSJ polling tremendous advantage

MM: For example, in this last election, it was clear that citizens under the age of 30 would play a pretty significant role in the electoral outcome.

Right.

MM: All of the polling organizations — Gallup, Harris and so on… They all said, “Well, these guys don’t have phones! They all have mobile phones, and we can’t call them!”. So it threw a whole variable into the tried-and-true polling methodology. It turned out — at least according to the stories that I read — that Fox/Wall Street Journal/MySpace had the most accurate polling data, as a function of all of the hyper-segmentation or micro-segmentation they did on MySpace. They were able to — as a function of their engagement with that youth market — were able to get very, very accurate polling data in terms of who was going to vote. And of the people that were going to vote, the probability of them voting, and for whom.

Absolutely. Yes. That’s a great example.

One of the actual products that was developed at Targetbase many years ago is a thing we refer to internally as “Channel Selector.” The idea again is that starting with the consumer… Let’s say it’s an individual on a client’s consumer database. We actually have a proprietary approach to identifying — again — with the use of various data sources. Identifying or — at the very least — modeling the channels that that particular individual consumes.

For example, whether it’s truly at the high-channel level of television, magazine, online, et cetera… All the way down to — in most cases — specific publications. Even some specific sites.

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