How can today’s marketing and advertising leaders create more impact with their online media plans and strategies? Dave Kelly, Founder & CEO at AnalyticsIQ has some tips:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Dave, tell us more about AnalyticsIQ and how the platform has evolved over the years? How did the story of the platform come about?

AnalyticsIQ was founded in 2007 as an offline marketing data creator. In the early days we were primarily focused on helping clients optimize direct mail campaigns through better targeting with our data and analytics. As marketing and advertising evolved, we identified a need to provide a complete 360-degree view of consumers from who they are, what they do, and – perhaps most importantly – why they make the decisions they make so that brands can provide better and more relevant advertising to consumers. But the trick is doing so in a privacy compliant and ethical manner – that’s why we take scientific and research-based approach to data creation rooted in mostly known offline data (not scrapped web data), data science, and cognitive psychology. In fact, we are the first data company to blend cognitive psychology in marketing data creation, and we’ve been taking that approach since 2014.

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What are some top analytics in marketing that you feel are now becoming more crucial for marketers to pay attention to?

Clearly, the recent pandemic has resulted in a sea change related to consumer behavior. Marketers – now more than ever – must move quickly to respond to these evolving consumer trends. Digital targeting has accelerated its takeover of B2C marketing, but as storefronts begin to reopen, marketers must attempt to bridge the gap to understand and measure digital advertising’s impact on sales.

Customer experience is also going to be crucial going into the ‘new normal’ as alternative experiences were implemented due to COVID-19, and some consumers may not be ready or may simply not want to go back to the traditional B2C interactions. So having true insight into the hearts and minds of your customers and prospects – from their life stage and family needs to their purchase motivations and shopping preferences – is critical in providing the best experience for the most customers.

How have you seen the need for richer analytics and data evolve over the years? What are some ways in which you’ve been seeing leading marketers optimize marketing ROI by breaking down their data and analytics to find opportunity / strengthen processes?

Absolutely – I believe digital marketing success ultimately comes down to data in today’s world.  There is now enough advertising noise that untargeted ads are very rarely successful. The savviest marketers start with their first party data – if there is something you know about your customers, use that to learn and optimize. From there, the next step in optimizing ROI is turning to reliable external and third-party data like ‘deterministic’ data where known traits correlate to an interest in a particular offering; or predicted data where traits and interests are found to be strongly correlated with an offering. Layering on additional insights to augment your first party data or to identify net new customers can really take your campaign ROI to the next level.

In a multichannel digital marketing environment, what are some top analytics focus and trends that marketers should be observing more?

As the marketing ecosystem gets more and more complex, the two big things to come to mind are fluidity and measurement.

By fluidity, I’m referring to consistent targeting the same audience with specific messaging across channels – whether they are scrolling Twitter on their mobile phone, checking emails on a laptop, streaming TV, or at their mailbox, brands must ensure they never lose track of their target audience and are able to meet them at whatever marketing channel with a consistent message.

Measurement is an important piece to the marketing puzzle, but accurately measuring your campaigns can be a challenge in this multichannel, multi-touch point environment. Using identity linkage data and other measurement data solutions, marketers can go beyond last-click-attribution and truly understand what is working along every step of the customer journey.

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Tell us about some future plans at AnalyticsIQ, what can users expect in terms of new innovations?

Our platform allows us to quickly respond to emerging trends (for example, we published our first wave of COVID-19 data in June of 2020) – but we also reserve part of our production capacity for innovation.  So much of our future innovation in terms of the creation of new data points will be determined by future trends and client needs. However, we are doing some really innovative stuff with B2B data and in the advanced TV and healthcare sectors.

Our team believes B2B marketing should be just a personalized as B2C marketing, but a lack of employee-level data makes that nearly impossible so B2B marketers have traditionally been left to craft strategies based on company firmographics. But businesses don’t make decisions, people do. So, our team has worked to link millions of employees and their professional profile to their consumer profile. This unlocks insight into the individuals – not just the companies – B2B marketers are targeting.

COVID-19 also accelerated shifts and evolutions in how we all consume content. Our data has been leveraged in the advanced TV ecosystem for years, but as the space explodes, we’re making investments in both building a dedicated team and bringing in new data sources that will allow us to be a powerful solution for advertisers looking to leverage advanced TV.

Not many industries have committed to being more data-driven in recent years and healthcare is no exception. More and more, we are seeing our data used to analyze and improve healthcare outcomes. That is why we have made a conscious effort to build HIPAA compliant data solutions that are valuable to healthcare providers like insight into social determinants of health.

How will martech and analytics evolve in future to change the game further for marketers?

There is no doubt that marketers will need to have a cohesive strategy for targeted communications with prospects.  This would include using data to target ads, segmentation tools to align messaging and offers to meet the prospects’ needs across channels, and measurement solutions to understand results and optimize for the future.

But outside of disruptive technologies, regulation is also something that will change martech and analytics in the future. As cookies and other identifiers approach their end and as more privacy regulation is implemented, marketers are still going to need to run successful campaigns and thus must be ready to respond to changes on the horizon.

A few last thoughts and takeaways for marketing leaders to keep in mind through 2021?

The most important thing to remember is that the game has changed:  consumers are exhibiting different behavior in a post-COVID world and marketers need to evolve their strategies to remain relevant.

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