Marketing Datafication No. 6 looks at the future of data-driven marketing. We will learn about the importance of data innovation and discuss the emergence of AI in data-driven marketing. But do not worry marketers, your unique and creative skills are still as important as ever.

The future of data and data-driven marketing is both bright but complex. Data gathering technologies will become a natural, often unseen, part of everyday life. As consumers, we will become oblivious to a lot of the data being gathered about us, or even to the fact it has just been gathered.

Staying up to date

Marketers will need to keep up to date with the latest technologies and techniques for storing and analysing data and implementing the insights they discover. The success or failure of marketing campaigns will largely depend on the quality of the data available and the analysis and modelling that is able to be done, explains Rob Jones, Director at Euler. Organisations that can find more innovative ways to gather and use data will hold the most power in the marketplace.

But don’t worry marketers! Your natural flair for creativity will be as vital as ever, you’ll just have to be more productive and more efficient in your execution. As your competitors get better at using their data, the competitive advantage you gain from the sophisticated analysis wanes. Data innovation will keep you ahead of the game, but the speed of creation and delivery will be key to success. Remember, data and analysis on their own does not make a marketing campaign. It supports the marketer to achieve even greater successes than were previously possible. It is the messages you create, your multi-channel approach to delivery, the experiences you enhance and the personalised engagement you nurture that is critical to success, says Rob Jones.

The importance of marketing automation

Marketing automation enables trigger-based communications to help marketers improve the speed of communications delivery and engaging with customers in real-time. By using marketing automation technologies with data insights, organisations will become increasingly more sophisticated at reacting to social, market or environmental signals with the best, most timely and relevant marketing messages.

But if we gaze deep into the future we cannot complete this exercise without discussing Artificial Intelligence (AI). The world’s largest companies, such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, are all investing money in AI to predict what each of their customers wants before they know themselves.

Amazon is already leading the way with anticipatory shipping. They gather so much data about customer’s behaviours and buying habits, and are so confident in their intelligence, they will prepare and ship your order before your place it. Of course, they have to get it right or risk massive losses.

With technology already allowing companies like Amazon to undertake anticipatory shipping, who would bet against the rise of fully integrated AI-driven marketing systems? Systems that, in real-time, can gather data, migrate it into a single customer view, run sophisticated analysis and statistical modelling and send marketing communications to multiple customers, across multiple devices and multiple geographic locations. As an AI-driven system, it will have the ability to learn from campaign performance and engagement data to enhance the customer’s future experience and increase sales revenues.