The Consumer Profile & Big Data

As a follow up to last week’s blog on Social Strategy, today we are going to look at the customer experience and how the best social and marketing strategy involves aggregation and proper use of data as well as an accurate consumer profile.

Modern consumers want engaging brand experiences that are on their own terms, that are accessible via any of their devices, and the experience must be seamless. When a consumer interacts with a Brand online or offline, they expect to be recognized and interacted with as the same person. They also expect that the Brand is represented consistently across all channels.

The challenge is to gather consumer information to better target the right message, at the right time, and through the channel that customer prefers. Harnessing the power of this Big Data requires synthesis and aggregation of different data sources into a single data warehouse and single customer view—the consumer profile is robust and accurate, the right message is sent, and the consumer gets what they want, in turn potentially leading to a sale.

Real success requires bringing together online and offline data sources such as DMS and CRM data, Chat data, Click data, Web tracking and Stats, Mobile data, and Social data, understanding the relationships, and…finally, acting on them in a way that is relevant to consumers regardless of the channel or device they are using to engage.

Some of the most engaged consumers in the digital world are daily social media users. The 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report by Marketing Sherpa reported that 75% of daily social media users say that email is the best way for companies to communicate with them, and 49% of Twitter users say that they made an online purchase because of receiving an email. These social media user stats are up more than 10% in both cases from email users alone.

Social media users are more willing to engage with marketing emails and, as a result, they are more likely to purchase. It is important to identify these valuable social users as they are also the most likely to share content with other high-value social users—getting the most out of the data that aggregated their singular and important consumer profile.