Three key data predictions for 2015

Three key data predictions for 2015As technological developments continued to change the way consumers interact with brands and organisations, 2014 flew by for data professionals. I don’t believe 2015 will be much different, and there are three key areas I’ll be keeping a close eye on during the next 12 months.
New technology, strategies and approaches will be key to reinventing the way marketing professionals work. We’re seeing more companies build tools to solve problems around communications strategies; there are a plethora available, from Ad Dynamix to Kitewheel. These are fairly new innovations that build on the behemoths focussed around big data solutions, like Alterian, which have been in market longer. Smaller players are now springing up with big ideas and technology that allows easier, in-depth visualisation and insight into how people like to be communicated with.
Clients need to connect with customers on the right platform at the right time, with the right message. That is only ever going to become more important, so the solutions available will advance further. In 2015, the maths men will continue to grow in importance, so agencies need to be more prepared than ever to understand and adopt the technology that’s available.
Partnerships and collaboration will be ever more important as clients continue to focus on a connected story. Educating clients to use technology to tackle and solve their problems will be one part of the story this year. The other big issue will be clients demanding connected stories across all platforms, and how agencies respond. At the moment, services are often provided by specialist agencies that tend to concentrate on one area of the customer journey such as targeting and acquiring new customers, optimising the conversion process across platforms, or new customer welcome and engagement/CRM strategies. A fully integrated approach across these areas will deliver a better service for clients and a more coherent journey for customers.
The only viable solution to this is for all of the agencies to work together and not ring fence their clients’ work to protect it; that’s the mentality of years gone by, and it won’t work in the new landscape. We all need to communicate and focus on one customer-centric plan. In my view, agencies currently claim to do this but in reality, they don’t. The problem is, they no longer have a choice.
For our part, we want 2015 to be about offering an end-to-end service, from customer insight and understanding to in-depth knowledge of the client’s market that drives acquisition and retention strategies – in other words, helping the client understand lifetime value.
Data continues to drive insight, enabling an understanding of which actions create the desired response. Clients now know data is important, because they have heard so much about big data. My concern is there is so much data available it can be hard for marketers to pinpoint the right insights to act upon, even if most of the time they are asking the right questions. This is where their agency needs to have good data at its disposal and a deep understanding of what drives the thought processes behind customers’ actions. Otherwise, their data will quickly become obsolete (a bit like the term ‘big data’ will be by the end of 2015, is my guess!).
So most people now ‘get’ data, but not how they should use it. Even technology companies can be guilty of waving around their shiny new platforms without really explaining what clients need them for. The key is to build solutions because there is a problem to solve, and show how it can be implemented into the client’s business. We now have the luxury of having different types of technology to play with; the trick will be getting these to talk to each other. There are a plethora of tools that all do similar but slightly different things; understanding which tools are needed and what is required to integrate them is the difficulty. This year, there’ll be a requirement for lots of ‘plumbers’ to make sure the platforms are enabled to do that.

Damian Coverdale is managing director of Response One – a St Ives Group company

5 Comments on "Three key data predictions for 2015"

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  3. RT @AmazeOneNews: Interesting article. RT @IanMcCawley Three key data predictions for 2015 http://t.co/sdWWQpgQtV

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