It’s a well known fact in advertising: the consumer journey is highly fragmented. There’s a vast range of opportunities for consumers to learn, compare prices, and make purchase decisions. This reality has created similar fragmentation in the way marketers approach the consumer journey. Massive investments into technology to build, deploy and understand the consumer journey are currently necessary to ensure users move through each stage of the funnel and to understand what made that happen. The complex requirements for brands come from systems to understand user behavior on marketplaces such as Amazon or Walmart, social media platforms, their own captive channels and much more! Even though brands have more data and customer insights, many are left wondering whether or not this equates to efficiency at scale and effective mapping of the consumer journey.
One For Transparency
For years, brands have been seeking increased transparency. Transparency into their data – they need to know which messages are reaching their consumers and the reaction they receive. This is critical towards understanding the consumer journey as well as the success of your campaigns.
Advertisers often rely on multiple technologies to enable transparency into their data which can significantly increase cost. They rely on these platforms to measure the impact of their campaigns in terms of brand equity and revenue. Last-touch attribution isn’t the only indicator of performance anymore, and there are plenty of ways to provide additional value to a client if you have advanced data. Everybody appreciates honesty and advertisers can look like rockstars if their technologies allow them to demonstrate the proof within the pudding.
One For Control
The greatest benefit of technology to advertisers is the ability to take back control of the consumer journey. The need for digital capabilities to take more control of the consumer journey is increasing and important for achieving efficiency at scale. As is usually the case, no big opportunity comes without challenges. Gaining control of the consumer journey requires time and resources to put systems in place to deliver on digital personalisation. You need to understand and be in control of your customer experience and customer engagement. This can include enhancing capabilities for media buying, creative content development and customer analysis.
One for Cost Savings
Brands, much like consumers, are seeking one-stop shopping from their vendors. Too much outsourcing can lead to the loss of control over the consumer journey and brand message. Today there exists a huge opportunity to save costs with the simplicity of centralized services (think Amazon’s “one-click checkout”). Rather than merging data within disparate systems to understand consumer journeys, brands prefer technologies with multiple capabilities. One example is illumin®, an advertising automation tool that offers planning, buying and omnichannel intelligence from a single platform. This allows advertisers to map their consumer journeys across screens and execute them in real-time with live insights.
Bringing all of these competencies under the same roof can actually save on costs. You need to maximize organic and brand focused search to drive revenue and volume purchases on marketplaces like Amazon or Target. Also, you need to educate consumers through direct-to-consumer channels to build relationships through a guided journey over time to significantly improve lifetime value. Brands often struggle to build traffic outside of these channels, therefore, it is more important now than ever to leverage the correct digital marketing and automation tools for your business to succeed.
Ready for more?
Are you ready for a singular platform that unlocks transparency, control and cost savings? Learn more about illumin to help you map consumer journeys and provide insights in real-time. Go here to schedule a demo and a representative will reach out to you as soon as possible.
