As the well-known proverb states, “one shoe will not fit every foot”, and the same applies when it comes to customers. Brands cannot simply treat all their customers in the same way. Customers will want and need different things, and, therefore, will expect the brand to deliver an exceptional, personalized customer experience which reflects this. As a result, brands and their marketers will need to develop ways in which they can communicate with, and satisfy, these varying groups. This is where customer segmentation can help.

Customer journeys don’t come down to a single touch point. Customers control how they interact with you and may engage a number of times before a purchase. Single touch attribution doesn’t account for the full scope of the customer journey and attribute revenue appropriately. Multi touch attribution, when used effectively, allows the marketer to turn insights into profitable changes to the customer journey.

As a top British daily news brand, our customer reaches 1 in 5 UK adults every day and 70% of the population each month. In 2019 it launched a tablet and smartphone app that allows users to enjoy content from the UK or Scottish editions of its daily periodicals, along with exclusive daily radio broadcasts, podcasts and videos from leading journalists. This draws 34,000 weekly users, with an impressive dwell time of 47 minutes per day.

As an enterprise organization, do you know what your customers want? What they really want? Ask a corner shop owner and they can likely tell you everything about each individual customer’s behavior, needs and desires. They will be able to make recommendations based on that customer’s buying habits and family, and confidently cater to their needs or wants. Of course, smaller businesses benefit from an emotional, invested customer relationship, but how can you create this corner shop customer experience at scale for millions or tens of millions of individual customers?

Although it faces some competition from the Scott Brinker Supergraphic, Gartner’s ‘Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising’ is arguably the most awaited martech and adtech market visualization of the year. While the Supergraphic is one dimensional and doesn’t really say a lot about a product’s journey, the Hype Cycle plots the reality versus the myth of every technology wave.

Gartner is able, through its global presence and position of authority, to accurately measure the technology talking points of the moment (CDP, DMP, machine learning, etc.) and provide estimated timelines for these innovations to reach the stage where customers will start to see their maximum value. Similarly, the Hype Cycle will alert the market to anything that has hyped too far and predict its obseletion, i.e. that it will cease to be talked about and developed, before it reaches maturity.

Consumer insight is used by marketers to find patterns and trends in their customers’ purchasing habits and discover precisely what is important to them, with the aim of using the findings to improve the effectiveness of campaigns. This type of data analysis is becoming more and more integral to the marketing strategies of many organizations as they look to improve declining results from direct marketing. In fact, our Data Deadlock report found that 86% of today’s marketers believe that they need to collect as much information as they can on their customers, showing that the majority are focused on gaining insights-driven solutions.