Data is your friend, and this is apparent during CXpose’s talk with Shawn. The more measurable an action is, the more insights it can deliver. And in large marketing organizations, these are usually accompanied by key performance indicators (KPIs), for example, lead generation for marketing.

Now, there is also something to help marketers measure the effectiveness of content, thanks to data and the work in Shawn’s previous organizations that he did with content, PR and communications. He described the metric “content influenced revenue” (CIR) as a way to look and measure the content that was utilized by marketing teams during the go-to-market process. In other words, CIR could help measure content in terms of how much revenue was brought in via closed deals.

“Content touches them at multiple digital interaction points and we have never been able to track when it is interacted with, who is interacting with it, and the duration of that interaction.”

“This is helpful because, with the right data and a good set of analytics on top of it, marketers could curate and create the most impactful content. And data allowed us to do that,” he said.

Photo by Andrew Neel

A journey in flux

Something happened the past few years that shifted the buyer’s journey away from in-person shopping to more digital-first channels. “People were looking and shopping and investigating their purchases in a very different way, which used more digital channels.”

In a way, this could have increased the opportunity for marketers to access more data and leverage more data in the hopes of delighting their customers and creating more stickiness and loyalty.

Shawn observed also that customers were shifting away from places like corporate websites. “Not to say that corporate websites are not important. But buyers are looking for information outside of that arena and they want to interact with brands in different places and in different ways.”

“I think you are going to have a hard time finding any aspect of marketing that is not influenced by AI. Many of them will be influenced by generative AI.”

Current research may say that a prospect will interact with your brand or product about a dozen times before visiting your website. Data analytics can help marketers to understand how and where their brands are interfacing with customers and open up opportunities for these “meets” to be interesting and memorable via technologies like generative AI.

“It is a really great on-ramp to engaging customers in a new way,” he said, adding that real-time and conversational interfaces are how he likes to engage with brands, and user interfaces and experiences are going to be massively impacted over the next five years.

“I think you are going to have a hard time finding any aspect of marketing that is not influenced by AI. Many of them will be influenced by generative AI.”

Bad marketing and balancing out the creepiness

All the great content in the world and carved out opportunities to delight customers however, do not make good marketing. Context and permission are a few important elements that have to be factored in as well, Shawn pointed out.

He shared a tale about an elderly lady who called up her nerdy son and informed him that the Internet was following her. She told him, “Well, I was looking at a sweater on a shopping site and now I’m at a cooking site and it’s trying to talk to me about the sweater I looked at!”

It did not make sense to see sweaters on a cooking site and she felt it was out of context. This is only one example of out-of-context marketing going bad. Marketers have to be careful of not creeping out prospective buyers by being transparent about how they use customer data and by applying the right context for marketing messages/engagements that they drive.

When a brand understands their customers very well, they can apply context well and have positive influence on a customer’s decision.

SUMMARY

Data analytics skills and experience segue a professional perfectly towards a career in marketing. Having talents with this capability makes marketing a more critical component in many organizations because of the insights it brings to processes and the data-driven action that it enables. There is opportunity to create positive, memorable experiences for prospective buyers, but this needs to be balanced with thoughtful handling of their data.