What is digital consumer intelligence? Let’s wind back the clock for a moment.
A quick history of digital consumer intelligence
In the 1990s, the digital age took off with the coming of the internet and the development of Web 1.0. This was when the term digital marketing was first used. In 1993, the first clickable banner went live, after which HotWired purchased a few banner ads for their advertising. The advent of the banner ad marked the beginning of the transition to the digital era of marketing!
By the 2000s came Web 2.0, when information flow, including channels, utilised by digital marketers, increased significantly. Since then, there has been an increasing focus on digital marketing and advertising over traditional media.
Today digital marketing is among the core responsibilities of Chief Marketing Officers, and budgets are significantly shifting to digital marketing. These budgets are witnessing double-digit growth, while traditional advertising continues the decreasing trend. With people spending more and more time online and the emergence of Web 3.0, the marketing budgets will continue to shift towards digital at an exponential rate.
Digital consumer intelligence for marketing
With so many opportunities in digital marketing, it’s easy to get into execution mode and just start doing. However, investing in your strategy is one of the best ways to grow your digital return on investment. A clear strategy reduces waste, adds focus to your efforts and builds on what is already working.
Like any marketing strategy, the bedrock of building a digital marketing strategy is in the clarity of defining and understanding your audience.
Currently, this understanding either is not there or is coming from survey-based research, where the audience claims their responses to posed questions by traditional marketing research agencies.
Digital consumer intelligence: a new way
Are the results from traditional research (that are great for inputs into traditional advertising) relevant to digital marketing initiatives?
Of course not!
Digital marketing strategies need inputs and insights from digital consumers; by analysing digital behaviour using AI that can process millions of online behavioural data points. Not just results from the century-old research methodology of face to face structured interviews.
For instance, for targeted communication on digital channels, relying on a consumer segmentation from the general population with a whole load of good to know information isn’t effective.
Instead, you need to plan and activate your digital strategy to clarify the types of digital consumers resulting from their online behaviours. This allows insight into which channels they spent their time on, the segment sizes, and an understanding of how they interact with your category and brand.
Of course, this is not just for segmentation. In all use cases in digital marketing, there is a reason to have a unique and focused set of data and insights accurate to the digital consumers. Otherwise, you’ll end up with no/less relevant data from the wrong audience for formulating your digital marketing strategy.
Faisal Khan – VP Products
D/A specialises in understanding Arabic Audiences using AI technology methods, including NLP, natively in Arabic dialects. Powered by Sila, D/A continually ingests and analyses the most influential conversations across the GCC to give brands instant access to ambient, unbiased consumer opinion, trends and sentiment.
Get in touch with D/A today to see how you can use unbiased digital consumer intelligence to understand your digital audience across the GCC.
