Kristina: Is data the most valuable currency in business now?
Evangelos Sideras, MD UK, MiQ: Data is the new currency' is a phrase that has been floating around for a little while now - but is far from being a platitude, especially when it comes to marketing.
We live in a digital era, which means all of our consumer preferences and habits we choose to share with advertisers online interlink to create a profile of who we are. This permits advertisers to present us with products we might actually need, events that could be of interest to us, offers and deals with we would be interested in unlocking - giving us a better consumer experience overall.
From an advertiser's perspective, data is the best way to get such an in-depth understanding of your prime audience (and could well be the key to unlocking new audiences.) Within a business, data insights of this kind are valuable to almost every department. From a sales perspective, for example, this data can enable you to identify your core demographic. And from a business perspective, these data insights can help drive many boardroom decisions and strategies (which markets to expand into next, where potential pain points in the business lie). In this way, the data allows every part of a business to be in sync. Unfortunately, many businesses, and marketers, are simply not aware of the true value of the wealth of data they sit upon.
Kristina: How can marketers make use of these data insights?
Evangelos: Unlocking the value of this data is critical if marketers are looking to improve their marketing strategies. Where a question mark hangs over your target audience, marketing fills in the gaps. These data insights can be used to track consumers based on their location - building an aggregated portrait of their purchasing preferences, and allowing you to tailor your strategies more carefully to their needs. The insights can also be a way for marketers to detect trends - say, seasonal or over the course of a given time period, a sporting event or topical news item. And ultimately, these same insights can help marketers to predict outcomes of their campaigns. Marketers can then craft a narrative with the data insights they have. Marketing intelligence can help articulate this consumer data even further, enabling marketers to understand why consumers behaved in a certain way, as opposed to showing what they did. In turn, this provides better accuracy for marketers when targeting, and makes measurement that much more sophisticated - leading to optimised campaigns overall.
Kristina: How can marketers use data to stay ahead of the curve?
Evangelos: The marketing matrix evolves quickly, and with so many businesses racing towards one goal, it can be easy for marketing efforts to get lost. Marketers need to select metrics that matter - rather than those that are easily measurable. Coalesce smart technology with human intelligence. This will allow you to outperform the competition.
Tags: advertising, advertising data, data tips, data trends, MiQ, value of data
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