Today’s fast-moving consumers are always connected, everywhere. On their smartphones and PCs, they send out signals of their intent every moment of the day. If marketers can capture that live intent data and resolve identity across devices and channels, they’ll always be able to keep up with their customers, no matter how fast they move.
But most advertisers miss the online cues or can’t identify their customers fast enough. As a result, they lose the opportunity to engage consumers in the critical moments when they’re most likely to make a sale. This reality presents today’s biggest challenges for marketers:
- How do you leverage these digital cues from shoppers in real time?
- How can you recognize the same customer across devices and channels?
- How can you react instantly with the right message or offer?
These challenges have been very difficult to resolve because in many cases, marketers are using a dozen or more technologies that don’t talk to each other, leaving data isolated in silos. If marketers do manage to connect online and offline data and resolve identity across channels, often the aggregated data is stale by the time the offline CRM data can be uploaded, matched, and activated.
Or if marketers rely on walled gardens to find their customers, they don’t receive the data they need to close the loop to understand what worked—and they don’t truly own their customer relationships.
For today’s marketers, it is vital to take advantage of live data, resolve identity and execute as fast and accurately as possible, to reach their customers with a highly targeted message while shoppers are still in-market. So how can they pull this off, and address the real-time needs of real people?
Here’s what savvy marketers need to efficiently target people when they’re in-market:
- The ability to collect live data from every channel where your customers are, including web and mobile sites and mobile apps.
- The ability to recognize customers in real time, all the time.
- The ability to onboard first-party data from CRM within minutes, to customize audiences based on known identity, attributes, and behaviors.
Those who will win the battle for the always-on customer are the ones with the strategy and the technology to combine live intent, identity, and profile data for the ultimate real-time marketing solution.
Marketers are realizing that people-based marketing is now a requirement for making the sale to today’s busy customers. This dynamic, personalized approach demands a platform that can execute end-to-end data collection, identity, audience segmentation, and media activation within minutes of recognition, so advertisers can engage with customers and prospects when it matters most.
At Signal, we believe that data collection, recognition, and distribution need to happen fast—that’s why our platform performs all of this in just 50 milliseconds. And when you want to activate your CRM data, Signal can onboard a million records in less than 30 minutes. That’s what you need to truly harness live intent for your people-based marketing.
Originally published September 11, 2015