Planning for Today – and Tomorrow – in Your Customer Data Strategy

The pace of change in digital marketing is staggering. Which gives marketers a serious challenge in that they must create programs and identify platforms that will work today while also paving the way to capitalize on the future consumer media environment. How people will connect tomorrow.

Some changes and time horizons in digital are very hard to predict. Ask an industry pundit to describe the consumer media world five years from now, and you’d probably get some statement to the effect that five years is simply too long for such an exercise because so many digital fundamentals will likely be disrupted during that period.

But just because you can’t predict EVERYTHING about the future, doesn’t mean you can’t feel very secure predicting SOME THINGS. The rapid and continued ascendance of mobile as our primary means of connecting seems a very safe bet. In markets like the BRICs where there were relatively low rates of PC ownership in the past, mobile absolutely dominates. And in markets like the US, Japan and EU where PCs have a strong presence, we’re seeing mobile’s share of total connected time rise every month. Not, interestingly enough, because PC is losing minutes of connected time, but rather because we use phones to be connected for so much more time than we were before.

If you agree that mobile is and will likely become even more the dominant means of consumer connection, then it follows that your customer data strategy should be mobile first. Understanding consumer actions in mobile environments – and particularly in apps – is as critical thing a brand can do to capture and interpret the signals consumers send us about what they want. This is important to accept because collecting data from in-app actions is very different from using third party cookies as in the PC web.

If you don’t have a data management infrastructure yet, make sure you’re thinking mobile first as you plan. And if you do, ask some questions about how your current toolset is capturing and action mobile data – in particular mobile app behavioral data.

Learn more about the importance of mobile app data and how to make it a part of your customer DMP and modeling by downloading our new whitepaper, “Is Half of Your Data Missing?”