Nick Martin says data insight is key to ‘convergence marketing’ and is now back in fashion for marketers.

There is an urgent need for marketers to make sense of the behavioural information they are gathering online, so they can see what is significant as opposed to what is just background noise. It’s becoming more pressing than ever as the industry deals with tight budgets and high targets.

Marketers need to convert ‘visitors’ to ‘shoppers’ at the lowest possible cost. To do this, they need to know which web visitors are worth investing in, to turn them into buyers.

So with the priority on ‘convergence marketing’, what changes can marketers make
to drive behavioural change, instead of just monitoring traffic?

Not rocket science
The answer is not rocket science – indeed, we’ve been doing it in the offline world for some time.

The key is to match what you know about a customer’s behaviour online with the other data you have about them, to build up a fuller picture of the person and whether or not they are in the right target segment for your product:

Do they need it? Can they afford it? Will it fit with their lifestyle priorities?

Marketers need to build up true insight from the data they have about a customer, tracking behaviour back to interaction with media channels, instead of just during the time they spend engaging with your brand. By matching online data with offline demographic information, though asking the consumer for a few basic facts about themselves, you can start to assess their propensity to purchase by knowing what they can afford, where they are and what their family commitments are likely to be.

Track responses
When you have data on the customer and their likelihood to make a purchase, you can start to track their responses and optimise the brand’s ‘conversation’ with them, over time and over channels.

Armed with this information, marketers are much better placed to make decisions about how best to influence customers’ buying decisions – and to identify which consumers are worth their investment and which are just ‘shopping around’.

To gain this insight and make it useful, data analysis – the discovery of customer behaviour patterns – needs to come first in campaign planning and should form the bedrock of any campaign. At the moment, it is all too often at the back of the line when in the early planning stages. 

Four-dimensional approach
Creating convergence-focused campaigns means ensuring activity is as tight as it can be around targeting the right consumer segment, via the right media, with the right offer, at the right time.

This four-dimensional approach can be tricky – it will be most effective when all four elements are done simultaneously – but it can be worked on incrementally, once the brand owner recognises that it all starts with data.

If you want to avoid the old adage: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” as John Wanamaker famously said, now is the time to start thinking about a strategy for 2010 and beyond.

Data analysis should be at the centre of your strategy, so you can target the people who will be profitable to your brand.

By spending on those people, return on investment  will come more quickly – we have seen this approach double conversions – and marketing  will make the contribution it needs to the organisation’s bottom line.

Success starts with data – it’s the new black!