The Challenges Presented by Data Silos

The modern consumer is busy, bombarded by advertisements, and is extremely savvy. They don’t have the time or the patience for advertising messaging that doesn’t speak to them or at worst, messaging completely unrelated to them at all. So is the consumer looking for more targeted and personalized marketing engagement, consisting of many consumer ‘touch points’ – from websites and social media to AdWords, email campaigns and phone calls? No.

Consumers don’t care about marketer metrics of when, how, and why they are receiving messaging specifically for them. When the message is personalized for them and received when they want to see it, they respond. The marketer’s task is tracking the touch points across channels, collecting and analyzing the data, to build the best approach for each consumer. But there is a challenge…data silos.

Data Silos

Many businesses and marketing agencies boast multiple tools or ‘data silos‘ –that aren’t well-integrated and do not easily share data or a common data model. This makes implementing real-time personalization challenging and providing a seamless user experience difficult. Data silos occur when different departments implement various information systems that meet their specific needs. While the system each department selects works well as a singular entity, it usually isn’t the best solution for a company as a whole.

Integration is Key

Integrated marketing platforms – such as ActiveDEMAND –  track prospects across multiple channels, solving the problem of data silos.

Real-time personalization empowers your company or agency to tailor website content (or a client’s) specifically, furthering the sale and increasing the chance that the prospect will make a sales-related move.

Data Needs a Personal Touch

There are more than six billion people inhabiting our planet, and each of them possesses their own interests, regional differences, and buying behaviors. No matter how great your content or how strong your sales pitch, it is impossible to make the same message apply to every individual throughout your entire prospective audience. Real-time personalization automatically modifies content to fit the needs of different audience members, ensuring their wants and needs are in the content being served to them.

Used correctly, real-time personalization ensures delivery of relevant and timely content to website visitors, and make your visitors feel like the entire online experience has been crafted specifically for them.

The Benefits of Real-time Personalization

  • Location and Internationalization – If your company or agency does business internationally, personalization can begin with localization and internationalization; these programs basically recognize a country a viewer is hailing from, directing them to a subdomain specifically crafted for their home nation (with content in their language). Additionally, dynamic content blocks alter what the visitor sees based on specific parameters. For example, a cityscape background image changes to reflect the visitor’s city.
  • Integrated Automation – Use a marketing automation system (like ActiveDEMAND) or CRM system to track information about web visitors to personalize your content, inserting data into the site when visitors view certain pages, or even customizing the information altogether based on your visitor.
  • Dynamic Content – Ultimately, the goal of real-time personalization is to alter the content based on different visitors to your site, using contextual clues and saved lead data to manage your content and serve different items to different market segments. This is achieved easily with marketing automation systems like ActiveDEMAND and relies on information gathered about a lead via a combination of database queries and lead generation forms.

Ultimately, marketers want to avoid data silos to best utilize real-time personalization, and realize the best ROI for their clients. The ActiveDEMAND integrated automation platform solves both challenges. First by eliminating the need for multiple tools and removing data silos. Second, with its full stack integration of data and dynamic content, targeting your prospective customers and speaking with a personalized message in real-time is simple.

Get out of your data silos. Sign up for a Free Trial or Schedule a Demo and see how ActiveDEMAND will work for you and your customers.