I once tried a digital detox. It failed miserably. When I realized I was distracted during quality time with my daughter, I blamed my smartphone and made some extreme changes. One might think, given all the bad press about so-called “smartphone addicti…
I once tried a digital detox. It failed miserably. When I realized I was distracted during quality time with my daughter, I blamed my smartphone and made some extreme changes. One might think, given all the bad press about so-called “smartphone addiction,” that using no technology would be the right cure.
The post Skip the Digital Detox—Abstinence Won’t Work (But This Does) appeared first on Nir and Far.
Manifesting is bull. There, I said it. According to Oprah, manifesting is bringing something tangible into your life through attraction and belief—i.e. if you think it, it will come. It encourages people to bring a goal to life by making vision boards,…
Manifesting is bull. There, I said it. According to Oprah, manifesting is bringing something tangible into your life through attraction and belief—i.e. if you think it, it will come. It encourages people to bring a goal to life by making vision boards, writing in manifestation journals, chanting positive affirmations, and speaking it into existence.
The post The Surprising Science of “Manifestation” appeared first on Nir and Far.
This is part of a series of blog posts about the Merkle Connected CX Cloud, and how this solution addresses the key use cases and most critical challenges our clients face in achieving a robust ROI from their CX technologies, practices, and strategies….
This is part of a series of blog posts about the Merkle Connected CX Cloud, and how this solution addresses the key use cases and most critical challenges our clients face in achieving a robust ROI from their CX technologies, practices, and strategies. Check out part one and two.
Before being able to understand its benefits, it’s important to align on what we mean by campaign analytics, because it is a broad topic that can be taken in different ways. Gartner defines campaign analytics as, “Analytics features or tools within a specialized platform that allows marketers to collect, analyze, model, and visualize data to optimize campaigns by better understanding prospects and customers, and their behaviors across channels and how this influences a path to conversion.”
Campaign analytics help you justify the value of your marketing investments. Not only that, if you look under the hood, campaign analytics house a wealth of added benefits, from comprehensive analytics functions to audience discovery and creative advantages. However, this can only work if the foundation is in place to connect your organization’s platforms and integrations for seamless data flow and holistic analysis.
Let’s dive in to get the complete view of what we mean here:
Continuous Optimization: The days of sitting down to “do analytics” for several hours or days when a campaign reaches an endpoint have come and gone. Instead, data integrations and analysis provide the ability to make campaign tweaks within flight and see what the impact is.
Content Preferences: Consumers expect you to anticipate their needs. Campaign analytics can inform how to market to individuals by understanding what messaging/creative resonates with customers and prospects and which ads are most relevant to drive conversion.
Channel Effectiveness: The sheer number of channels to reach consumers continues to increase – and proliferation of audiences across these channels can quickly become overwhelming. Campaign analysis can help in determining where to display messages for particular consumers that produces the best results.
Customer Support: Campaign analytics also help to uncover areas of the buyer’s journey that could be simplified or improved. For example, it could show points of drop-off in the journey to highlight the ways you can reduce friction and simplify the path to conversion.
Discover New Audiences: Data analysis allows you to gain visibility into the behavioral attributes that make up campaign interactions and learn how those attributes influence the consumer’s path to conversion. With these techniques, you can build out look-alike audiences to test into and create more effective targeted advertising campaigns.
Of course, getting to a place to reap these benefits takes time and the right team, process, and technology. There are several challenges that often get in the way of getting this right. Analytics that can provide insights across all your channels must rely on a foundation and infrastructure that can bring clean, standardized, and enriched data together and then integrate it with the platforms and tools in a seamless and efficient manner to use for this benefit. Too often when working with an organization, we hear about siloed data; data stuck in its channel of execution or data that is not standardized in a way where it can marry with other channel data. These barriers inhibit analytics teams from making progress.
Two key data issues continually surface:
1. Data quantity: In today’s era of information, marketing teams are recording everything; every consumer click, impression, and view. However, this quantity of data is irrelevant if it cannot be structured and analyzed for insights that allow for in-campaign optimizations. Marketers are left wrestling with how to best organize data to evaluate its meaning. Organizations today are stuck in a place where data scientists spend the majority of their time wrangling and formatting data, rather than analyzing it which leaves a lot of revenue on the table.
2. Data quality: Not only is there a problem in terms of the massive amount of information organizations must sift through, but the data itself is often viewed as unreliable. Organizations need a process to maintain data quality so that employees can leverage accurate information to make the right decisions.
The Connected CX Cloud is a solution that creates a flexible and scalable data asset. By leveraging common identity (powered by Merkury) to build 360-degree views of your customers and prospects, it allows organizations to bring together data to track individuals through their experience as engagements happen, both online and offline across campaigns. The CX Cloud comes with the ability to clean and enrich your data. It can leverage both terrestrial and digital identities and provides the tools to pieces to build a foundation to fuel deep analytics and personalization activation.
Since writing Indistractable, I’m often asked what tools and apps I personally use to get the most out of my day.
But after years of research into the psychology of productivity, focus, and the causes of distraction, I’ve learned that there is no one m…
Since writing Indistractable, I’m often asked what tools and apps I personally use to get the most out of my day.
But after years of research into the psychology of productivity, focus, and the causes of distraction, I’ve learned that there is no one magic tool. Rather, the best tool is the one you’ll actually use,which is why I only rely on just a few to be at my best.
The post Best Productivity Tools: 6 That Stuck With Me appeared first on Nir and Far.
Despite Google’s latest third-party cookie announcement, delaying deprecation from 2023 to 2024, identity is still the heart of a brand’s ability to deliver great customer experiences in a privacy-safe way. And the smartest brands are preparing now to …
Despite Google’s latest third-party cookie announcement, delaying deprecation from 2023 to 2024, identity is still the heart of a brand’s ability to deliver great customer experiences in a privacy-safe way. And the smartest brands are preparing now to gain competitive advantage. But what are the core capabilities that must be adopted to gain a competitive advantage in the evolving advertising ecosystem?
Due to these industry changes, technology that relies on third-party cookies to enable activation and measurement is becoming obsolete. Many organizations have begun to heavily invest in identity, data, security, and more advanced ways to activate and measure media spends. Beyond that, brands need the core components that fill the gaps left by a cookie-less world to ensure that they have the tools to succeed in a privacy-safe way going forward.
It is also important not to confuse identity platforms with a customer data platform (CDP). A true connected identity platform will manage data and identity outside a client’s walls, while a CDP’s strength is within the walls of an organization. Read more on how they work together here.
A connected identity platform should include these components:
Unsurprisingly, these platforms provide an identity solution using a person-based ID. This identity anonymizes the individual person but also enables an organization to act on the ID across the ad ecosystem (i.e not cookies). This also provides the ability to leverage the identity graph of the provider, enabling greater reach (or matches) in media endpoints.
These platforms can supplement and enhance first-party data with second- and third-party data stores. This combined data also uses a person-based ID to bolster what you understand about customers,
These platforms are built with the marketer in mind. They offer several ways that someone without coding skills can build and manage audiences across data sources and provide high-level insights and sizing before activation. These platforms have a long list of turnkey integrations with media end point to make media planning/activation scalable while shorting time to market.
A clean room is a privacy-safe environment where data sources can be meshed at the individual customer level. The cleanroom enables an organization to combine different data sources or signals of their own and/or of other partners in a privacy compliant manner. The two main use cases of the connected identity platform clean room enable an organization to perform advanced audience analytics insights, modeling, longitudinal analysis, closed-loop measurement (connecting online exposure to offline conversions) Having this advanced analytics workbench connected to data sources and end points is a key advantage of an integrated clean room.
One of the key features of connected identity platforms is the ability to bring all these disparate data sources into a privacy-compliant analytics workbench where closed-loop measurement, advanced insights, and custom modeling can be done on persistent person-based ID.
All these features help a marketer address the changes of the evolving ad tech ecosystem. While post-cookie digital ecosystems might bring new challenges, organizations that employ a transactable identity backbone and analytics tools will be in a strong position for the future.
Brands must find a solution that allows them to use these capabilities while also building their own identity graph consisting of all identifiers and signals while they can. The graph will get smarter over time, making it easier for brands to recognize and connect with people in a more personal and relevant way, wherever they are. We know more change is coming. This is the time for brands to invest and prepare.
Want to learn more about connected identity platforms? Need help with your analytics? Contact our team here.
Many people bristle at the idea of using a schedule planner. They don’t want restrictions and prefer the freedom to tackle things as they come up. While an open day is wonderful on a vacation when you have nothing to do but relax, vacations eventually …
Many people bristle at the idea of using a schedule planner. They don’t want restrictions and prefer the freedom to tackle things as they come up. While an open day is wonderful on a vacation when you have nothing to do but relax, vacations eventually end. In the real world, there is work to finish, people to meet, and a family to nurture. When we don’t plan time in our day to do what really matters, our life quickly falls out of balance.
The post Free Schedule Maker: a Google Sheet Template for School & Work appeared first on Nir and Far.
The internet is inundated with articles that have titles like “The Best Productivity Tools of the Year” and “Productivity Apps That Will Make Your Life Easier.” Dozens if not hundreds of apps claim to help people focus, manage their time, and stick to …
The internet is inundated with articles that have titles like “The Best Productivity Tools of the Year” and “Productivity Apps That Will Make Your Life Easier.” Dozens if not hundreds of apps claim to help people focus, manage their time, and stick to healthy habits.
The post A Fail-Safe Trick in your Search for the Right Productivity Apps appeared first on Nir and Far.
The loudest voices in our culture today say yes. During a conversation about technology on his mega-popular podcast, Joe Rogan said, “We’ve got a real addiction problem in this country.” In a congressional hearing in 2021, U.S. representative Kathy Cas…
The loudest voices in our culture today say yes. During a conversation about technology on his mega-popular podcast, Joe Rogan said, “We’ve got a real addiction problem in this country.” In a congressional hearing in 2021, U.S. representative Kathy Castor of Florida said that apps are “designed to be addictive.” During his 2020 presidential campaign run, Andrew Yang said, “Our kids unfortunately are getting addicted to smartphones.”
The post You’re Not Addicted to Technology. Here’s What’s Happening Instead. appeared first on Nir and Far.
B2B buyers will be, and always have been humans with emotions. Despite this, B2B marketers have not always woven this information into their strategies. They use complex, feature-laden language which can make the buying process difficult.
All of us ha…
B2B buyers will be, and always have been humans with emotions. Despite this, B2B marketers have not always woven this information into their strategies. They use complex, feature-laden language which can make the buying process difficult.
All of us have learned what makes a smart business purchase: ROI. ROI is serious. ROI isn’t fun, engaging, adventurous, or inspirational. But it is important, and we’d be fools to not understand it. At the same time, it isn’t the end-all of persuasion, especially as products become more commoditized and less differentiated.
As emotive humans, buyers are not pure ROI, feature-evaluating robots. People like drama. They like humor. They like novelty. Ideas like emotion, empathy, and values are at the heart of our culture. They want to engage with personable, creative brands that know how to make ideas “pop” and create long relationships with them.
For B2B marketers, the thought of including emotion in their work may be intimidating. How can someone relate on an emotional level to such straightforward topics? But by using emotion in their work, B2B marketers can elevate their brand to stand out above most others. Trust, confidence, and humor are all ways to engage customers by incorporating it into previous selling tactics. As younger generations become more prevalent in the corporate world, there has been a shift from seeing strictly professional life to a blend of professional life and personal experience. Consumers want to share values with companies and know the people they are working with on a personal level. They want to work with brands that touch on fairness, the environment, diversity, and equity. They want to see real action being taken and see how brands really can make a difference in the world and in their relationship.
Personalization in communications can help make the emotional approach possible. It can be used hand in hand with data, and when used correctly makes the experience for the buyer much more impactful.
The idea of “human enablement” vs. “technology” captures these concepts in way that can elegantly merge with a B2B brand’s core messaging. The company strives to move human wellbeing forward, whether that’s through the tactical value of their products or how they affect society at large.
Want to learn the key components of creative transformation needed to move forward? Read Merkle’s new report, Push the B2B Boundaries, here and learn how you can obtain a more creative and out of the box process.
Personalization at scale is the north star for customer-obsessed brands today (and any brand with a growth plan has likely embraced customer obsession). It’s the ability to deliver a unique experience tailored to the circumstances, values, and behavior…
Personalization at scale is the north star for customer-obsessed brands today (and any brand with a growth plan has likely embraced customer obsession). It’s the ability to deliver a unique experience tailored to the circumstances, values, and behaviors of an individual – that meets them where they are in the context of a specific moment in their journey and responds to each next step.
