Unveiling Marketing Insight

The convergence of devices and channels has provided both a core challenge and numerous opportunities for gleaning insight from available data.

The Core Challenge (and a First Step Toward Fixing It)


As devices and channels converge, the ways that consumers experience brands broadens. As a result many marketers find themselves faced with numerous data sources (website analytics, email marketing databases, customer relationship management software, etc.) with no real means of connecting the data. The data confusion often leaves many sources of information underutilized — meaning lost opportunities for refining marketing activities.

The key to solving this challenge is integration. While integrating digital systems into your current processes is not always an easy task, software vendors are beginning to get the message and are providing new, simpler ways of doing this. For brands that regularly use customer relationship management (CRM) software, this is a good place to start.

Many systems now have the ability to integrate with popular CRM pieces either natively or with relatively low-cost add-ons, so gaining useful business intelligence data is not as cumbersome as it once was.

Learning by Example So what kind of conclusions can we draw from the most current tracking tools and available data? Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Mobile Web: Most web analytics software supports the tracking of mobile device usage, and many (including Adobe Omniture Suite and Google Analytics) permit the segmentation of mobile users. Many marketers using these systems may not realize that they already have access to these insights, and they may be missing the opportunity to optimize and refine their online campaigns to target these users more accurately.

Email and Social Media: By linking email and social marketing programs, marketers can connect their permission databases with their followers and identify some of their most engaged prospects and customers.

Digital Printing: Through digital printing and personal web addresses (pURLs), marketers can now track responses to direct mail campaigns online. In many cases this can allow for identifying individual interactions to determine which prospects and/or customers have engaged with your brand and which products interest them the most.

These pieces are a few ways of integrating data systems into your current processes so that you can make more informed decisions for your brand and reach your audience more effectively. The insight is out there — it’s just a matter of using the right tools to find it.