Is your data telling a story worth capturing?

Every search, click, share, comment and swipe is invaluable in telling us something about your customers.

Data is increasingly available to help refine ‘always-on’ marketing activities across the lifecycle of any customer journey. Tracking our customers across all available touchpoints means we can use data signals to enrich future customer experiences, encourage them to return, or allow us to identify and mine similar audiences. With information being collected from an ever-growing number of connected devices and by increasingly sophisticated tracking through websites and apps, we are afforded a deeper understanding on the patterns of behaviour that lead to purchases or other goals.

Most companies are using less than half of data they collect to inform decision making

A recent upsurge in the number of tools that can harness this information, as well as advancements with the targeting and prospecting capabilities of networks such as Google and Facebook has created a staggering breadth of data available to brands. This abundance of data gives advertisers lots of important signals that brands can potentially act upon.

Things that help manage digital relationships with new and returning customers or provide insight on placement, targeting and messaging for advertising can be regarded as Marketing Technology or MarTech. Chiefmartec.com have been totting-up and mapping this expanding landscape for several years. In 2011 there were 150 tech solutions identified, this year we’re looking at over 5,000.

Making sense of your MarTech

Your ‘tech stack’ could include your CRM system, software used for email marketing or to organise databases and profile for new prospects. It includes web analytics solutions, call tracking providers or website experience management tools. Beyond those, sentiment analysis tools can quickly evaluate how people feel about a company or product in social and review spaces whilst predictive analytics algorithms could be using millions of data points to predict the results of your next ad campaign before you’ve even run it.

UK brands’ investment in MarTech is growing

A recent WARC survey revealed that combined in-house and outsourced spend on this sort of technology represented 18% of marketing budgets on average. It is predicted that this will increase a further 10% by the end of 2018. Whether this is replacing spend on inefficient channels will depend on the advertiser, but what is known is that all solutions and the data they contain needs to be respected, understood and used to generate real-world actions.

That’s where a subset of MarTech can help: data centralisation and visualisation tools bring together multiple feeds from publishers, web analytics, call tracking, client databases and more to build a fuller picture of marketing performance all in one place.

Space and Time investing in best-in-class technology to service Clients’ data stories

S&T Insights launched earlier this year, using the best of this technology to collect, organise and present data beautifully; to provide insights and recommendations that can be fully understood and acted upon. This launch was driven by investment into cutting-edge data visualisations that depict the integrated nature of a customer journey both on and off line. All this managed and interpreted by humans who understand products, personality and customers, and know the value of getting the right ads in front of the right people at the right time.

Heading up the new data division, Planning and Insight Director Tom Carter is buoyant about its future prospects: “at Space and Time our clients have noted our experience in data; we have a proven track record of unearthing insight from each piece of marketing activity and using it to enrich future campaign planning. The new Insights team exists to help clients to put find and deploy the right tech solutions that can capture as much data as possible, and then to help join the dots, extract insight and act upon it.”

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