Why Unified, Cross-Channel Customer Data Is Essential for Marketers

Hubspotblog reporting:
When asked about the effectiveness of their social media campaigns, most marketers will point to their latest Facebook Insights report or the size of their company’s Twitter following. When asked whether Facebook or Twitter influenced their customers’ decisions to purchase however, the data gets a bit fuzzier. Your company’s fan Page may get a lot of comments, but what exactly does that mean for your marketing strategy? A 2011 report released by Experian on digital marketing trends highlights the gap between the multi-channel data that most companies have and the insights they need to improve their marketing.  “Even though most companies are doing multichannel marketing, very few are truly integrating their cross-channel initiatives. Gaps include the lack of a unified customer segmentation framework across channels as well as incomplete measurement of the impact of each marketing touch on customer behaviors.”
Furthermore, a Forrester study of U.S. interactive marketing professionals puts numbers to that statement. According to Forrester, 57 percent of marketers measure each of their channels, but only 28 percent measure the influence of one interactive channel on another.
Customers do not use channels in isolation. A customer using Twitter is likely to have a Facebook account and may even cross-post content to each network. Real interaction with your company or brand is much more tangled, and different channels are influential at different points. Here’s some marketing research food for thought:
28 percent of customers perform shopping activities from their phone while inside brick-and-mortar retail stores.
The Experian Report found that combining social media and email significantly increases consumer response to that email.
In a survey by Pricegrabber, half of online shoppers in the winter of 2010 said they used social networks to share great deals on products.
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