Are you a pragmatic marketer? Are you building your marketing house with a strong foundation that will support your programs and goals well into the future?
Or, are you a pushover for the shiny new marketing tool, flitting from one new trend to the next, always looking for a cool new campaign?
Today’s fragmented, chaotic landscape is filled with a million distractions that can divert marketers’ time and attention away from the tried and true. All those marketing basics – knowing your customer, setting goals, having a realistic plan for meeting your objectives – don’t seem as as sexy and fun as chasing the next big thing.
But in marketing, pragmatic has become the new sexy, says Hollis Thomases, Principal Analyst – Digital Marketing, Advertising, AdTech at Digital Clarity Group.
“Those who rush to be first adopters just to wear the crown don’t always win if in so doing they neglect their house, and by that I mean the foundation they ought to be focused on instead of object-chasing,” according to a recent blog post by Thomases.
“Does it really make sense to attempt a deployment on the latest and greatest Insta-book-oogle-gram without a strategy? Do you know if you can reach your target audience with this tool/platform/program? Do you have a means by which to measure what you’re doing…and do you even know by what yardstick you’re going to judge these measurements successful?” Thomases asks.
In a solidly constructed marketing house, everything is designed to fit and to work well together. But unfortunately, many marketers are operating with a broken, aging data foundation that doesn’t mesh with the cross-channel behavior of today’s fast-moving customers.
The result: advertisers and their vendors lack a cohesive view of customer behavior offline and online, across the web and mobile platforms. They don’t have the timely, rich data they need to reach consumers with the right message, at the right time in the right context.
So in 2014, the true adventurers are investing in their marketing foundations rather than spending more on marketing flash. They’re building data infrastructures that connect and activate their cross-channel data so they can understand and interact with customers simultaneously.
Signal’s Open Data Platform was created from the ground up to help marketers make their data and technologies work better together. Learn more about how Signal’s decidedly pragmatic technology can help you build a foundation that transforms data into insights and allows you engage with customers across the web, mobile devices and beyond – for improved engagement, loyalty and conversions.
Originally published July 16, 2014