Quaero's Roman Lenzen Featured in 1:1 Media Article on Digital Marketing

Building a Better Picture of the Digital Customer

Google recently alerted its users through its updated privacy policy that it would begin combining its YouTube and search histories with its existing account information to present users with more targeted purchasing suggestions when using the site.

Google explains in the policy that the new changes would prompt recommendations for "Jamie Oliver" videos if a user is looking for recipes on YouTube, for example, as well as conducting numerous "Jamie Oliver" Google searches.

The move will likely set the bar for companies across all industries that struggle with building a robust picture of their digital customers. Often the challenges include fragmented data across different customer groups, departments, and channels; an inability to aggregate and analyze web data, difficulties mapping behavioral personas, and organizational ineffectiveness.

Deepinder Dhingra, head of strategy and planning at Mu Sigma, says these challenges are pervasive. He recommends creating a map of personas—digital and behavioral—to determine the offline interactions that took place between customers' online activities.  For example, when a customer makes a purchase online, did he come from the store or another website? If he did visit the store first, why didn't he buy? "It's about how to map online behavior to physical behavior," he says.

David Hogue, vice president of experience design at Fluid, counters, saying that behavioral data will no longer suffice in terms of accurately understanding target users or building personas. He says that an element missing in much of the current data analyses efforts is the emotional component of why customers are clicking. Customers' motives are an integral part of a persona. "People are clicking on things, but we don't know why. What is the motivation? How enjoyable was the experience?" he says.

In the quest to build robust digital personas, an increasing number of companies are connecting Twitter handles and Facebook user IDs with unique customer IDs to build a better picture of their digital customers, according to Sid Banerjee, CEO at Clarabridge. "The companies that are more advanced have been doing that for a couple years now," he says.

Click here to read the full article in 1:1 Media.