It’s All About You!

In recent years marketing agencies have seen a separation from media and creativity. However, global brands have begun demanding their marketing teams contain media and creative groups and dedicated data and analytics teams. Brands have noticed a shift in marketing and are clamoring to become more collaborative, integrated and data driven for one main reason: their clients expect it. Clients want a more personalized approach to their marketing, but this isn’t a new idea.

CRM agencies or Customer Relationship Management agencies have always used strategies and technology to manage and analyze customers, and now they are finding themselves at the head of new customized marketing trends. Originally, CRM agencies were known as direct-marketing agencies. The focus on these agencies was center on performance advertising by creating and delivering personalized mail and media. Today, these agencies manage email databases, customer loyalty programs, and anything else tied to a customer’s record.

Previously, and for some agencies today, marketing has been channel-based in both planning and execution. A channel stood for an audience a brand or marketing agency wanted to reach. These marketing agencies and brands would make themselves appeal to a group of customers through email and TV and try to appeal to a lot of people that had similar interests or problems. This type of planning was strictly channel- and placement-based, but this is swiftly changing.

Now marketing is people-based. This means servers are matching to other servers of audiences on all of media. Imagine if you will, marketing becoming like a funnel. Before we started by marketing to a wide audience, hoping to appeal to one person, but now that funnel is narrowing, and marketing is getting a user-level accuracy that will maximize its effectiveness.

People-based marketing is about more than just coming up with the type of individual a company will target; it is about planning around known specifics about individuals and their many different personas on different media platforms.

Before a digital marketing agency could get ahead by providing cheaper media rates or creating the best inspiring work, but people-based marketing combines both the creative and media on an individual basis to engage and retarget consumers. In addition to this, new metrics are available. Before an agencies effectiveness, could be determined mainly by media-mix modeling, but now multiple systems can sync a person’s IDs, making it possible for the actual effect of media and creativity measurable on an individual scale.

Many companies and digital marketing agencies are adding CRM divisions to their ranks; however, adding this division isn’t the only way. Building an audience-based planning practice is one way around these divisions, and it has a similar effect.

Great things are in the works for the advertising industry. The use of CRM agencies and people-based marketing will demand more creative and sophisticated products from digital media agencies.

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