Located in Mumbai, Netcore Solutions is a full-stack, Omni-channel marketing automation solution provider helping enterprises redefine their digital marketing & enterprise communication.

Did you know that the average adult consumes an average of 12 hours of media per day? Let’s sit with that statistic for a minute. As someone who works in the marketing technology space, the first question that number raises for me is: What exactly is the average adult doing during those 12 hours? What channels is he on? Does he use multiple devices? What content hooks him the most? How often does he transact? Marketers everywhere are probably plagued with similar questions. They’re also confronted by the fact that this whopping number represents a huge opportunity for them - customers who are always-connected can be hooked and engaged with across a dizzying array of touch points. But as humans do in their real lives, digital natives also behave differently at different stages of their digital journey.

Consider Riya, a 30-year old shopper who prides herself on getting the best discount possible when online grocery shopping. She aggressively hunts for bargains and deals on food items and is more than happy to buy a $3 sack of flour instead of a US$ 3.50 version, even if it means compromising on quality or brand name. The same person doesn’t blink twice before shelling out hundreds on luxury items like handbags and shoes. Similarly, Riya’s activities on LinkedIn are mainly to promote her social media consultancy, while she uses Facebook to keep in touch with old school and college friends.

Marketers have long been using the tried-and-tested formula of personas to create targeted marketing messages. But to consider Riya as a financially conservative shopper would be a terrible mistake. She just does not fit into a traditional, one-dimensional, archetypical persona. And Riya is not an exception. In today’s world, she is the norm, and emblematic of a phenomenon called consumer parallelism, where a single customer can have many, different digital avatars. The behaviour of these multi-faceted customers varies from channel to platform to device, rendering generic personas woefully inadequate. To unlock the mystery of who a customer really and to be able to truly personalise for maximum conversions, marketers need more.

Today consumer intent sits in the driver’s seat of every single business. And capturing consumer intent requires marketers to go beyond traditional demographics. Today, consumers traverse non-linear paths in their buying journeys across touch-points, so marketing cannot be an isolated action. Marketers need to stay constantly connected and ready to respond in real time to foster seamless experiences. So, broad marketing personas and traditional segmentation needs to go deeper and wider to analyse the behaviours, emotions, motivations, preferences and transactions of customers across all channels and platforms. The never ending channel/device/platform jump has created a cacophonous marketing environment. Marketers struggle to track all the relevant data and gather the right insights to respond appropriately and in real-time. This calls for a nuanced strategy that puts marketer in a position to be able to deeply understand their customers and anticipate their next move. And at the core of this strategy lies data.

With the fight to grab consumer attention, real-time marketing in milliseconds is ever more critical today. Data-driven insights help marketers engage with impulsive consumers through relevant and real-time interactions

Data and Automation to the Rescue
Data is the one thing that marketers have in abundance. A centralised database is a gateway for varied automation and analytics tools, deployed to enhance customer experience. There is an enormous amount of data that is collected across platforms. But to be customer first today, businesses strategies need to be backed by the right, structured data that captures the consumer’s micro-moments. Once this data is cleaned and readied, it can be collated into a central data repository, giving marketers a single view of all customer data. Then, by integrating the transactional and marketing data, they can deploy varied analytics that draw micro-insights from customer data and measure the efficacy of campaigns. This integrated approach paves way for hyper-personalised, real-time targeting and engagement, increasing revenue and building an Omni-channel customer experience. With the fight to grab consumer attention, real-time marketing in milliseconds is ever more critical today. Data-driven insights help marketers engage with impulsive consumers through relevant and real-time interactions. Marketing automation solutions then step in to allow marketers to create contextual and customised marketing campaigns, and automate effort-intensive tasks, which improve operational efficiency. Armed with a 3600 view of the customer and insights on evolving consumer behaviour across channels, marketers are able to nurture leads, cross-sell, up-sell and accurately measure marketing RoI.

Traditional demographics just do not make the cut in an era of consumer parallelism. They don’t include the heterogeneous preferences of the customer and thus falls short of deciphering the divergent avatars of consumers. With granular micro-segmentation, marketers can understand and identify key customer segments and respond with a customised marketing mix to drive engagement and help nudge their buying decisions. The empowered and hyper-digital consumer is perpetually connected, displays divergent behaviour based on the platform she is on and is no longer a passive recipient of marketing messages. Marketers who use the tools of micro-segmentation, analytics and automation to provide the best personalised customer experience seamlessly across platforms, will stay relevant. Henry Ford aptly said, “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.” Businesses that understand the need to go beyond the ‘post-demographic’ marketing approach, to address the evolving customer, will emerge winners.