We recently interviewed Ben Moreau, director for strategy and innovation at Experian Asia Pacific to discuss the power of data-driven marketing and how it drives the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. Experian is a LiveRamp partner, its data is available through the IdentityLink™ Data Marketplace feature.
1. Why do you think data-driven marketing is important?
If you’re not using data in your marketing, you’re just guessing. This applies to the decision making for where and to whom you show your marketing messages as well as how effective they are. It’s well accepted now that data is vital for marketing – now it’s more about which data drives the best results and if your marketing processes are using the data in the best way.
2. Tell me a bit more about the new Mosaic segments? How can marketers benefit from the new segments?
Mosaic is a way to classify consumers. It provides insights both into your current customers and their lifestyles as well as intelligence into new customer acquisition.
Marketers use Mosaic to improve their CRM strategies and give more relevant messages to their current customers. As Mosaic is a sophisticated population segmentation they can then understand where to market to relevant new customers, both online and offline.
3. What innovative ways are marketers using data to improve campaign performance and learn more about their customers?
We see marketers using 3rd party consumer data to feed back into the very core of their business strategies, that then flows down to marketing. They understand the emerging segments of consumers they want to capture and their behaviours and preferences and then adapt products and services accordingly.
We also see measurement becoming more and more relevant. As data flows more into marketing strategies, the expectations are that data can drive measurement also. Closing this loop has always been difficult but data and technology are coming together to provide real breakthroughs here.
4. What’s your advice for digital marketers looking to become more data driven?
I would start quite simple. Think about what you really know about your current customers and then use easily available data sets that provide real insights to find out more. Once you have a really good sense of who your customers are and what they want, you can then start to serve them better and adjust your marketing accordingly. You don’t need masses of data points – you need insights. So look for tools and products that can easily provide these.
5. What can new clients expect from our joint offering?
Quite simply, clients can expect much better marketing results – especially in customer acquisition. The data Experian gather around consumers and the segments we create are directly relevant to brand marketing, and the ability to connect these offline insights to the digital world through LiveRamp’s identity graph is revolutionary.
Clients can now greatly improve their capability to reach the right consumers with relevant messages at the place where they spend the most time – digital devices.
6. How do you think marketing ecosystem will shape up in three to five years in APAC?
I see a convergence of a few trends within marketing, namely the expectation of consumers to be reached with truly relevant messaging, and a lower tolerance of brands who don’t. APAC is leading the globe in terms of smartphone dominance and these devices are hugely personal to the consumer, and also are incredible sources of data and information for marketers. Marketers will have to use sophisticated applications of data to stay relevant in this competitive space and test and adapt their strategies extremely quickly. Already we see machine learning and automated marketing becoming prominent to adapt and learn marketing strategies in real time. This will continue and sophisticated technology to gather and unify the data on the marketing side will be crucial to ‘win’.