Web analytics has reshaped how marketing professionals thought about the role of data in decision making.
The next major wave for our industry was the shift to an expanded example of digital analytics.
Companies continued to measure the effectiveness of the web, but also started to analyze email, advertising, video, social and offline marketing channels.
Sophisticated nurturing and content marketing strategies emerged as the norm, and enterprises pushed to understand their 「digital」 customers holistically. This includes social, PR and of course, offline brand interactions.
Today, most organizations are thinking about marketing analytics – marketing interactions with customers and prospective customers.
This broader view is to make sense of big data, which lead marketers into machine learning, predictive algorithms and the beginnings of a lights-out marketing automation movement.
The analysis is beyond intelligent — incorporating artificial intelligence and data science.
In a marketing analytics worldview, companies must have an accounting of and insight into all of their marketing programs in all of their channels, including web/browser, mobile apps, TV/video, social, paid media, field, print, outdoor and others.
As we move beyond marketing analytics, I believe the next wave is customer intelligence.
This moves the focus beyond the organization to analytics for the entire enterprise.
In the customer intelligence example, sales, product development, customer care and other customer-facing teams will begin to leverage the marketing analytics insights and tools to gain insights to shape their job functions.
This will require us to make it even easier to find insights that can be acted upon. Organizations must have a 360-degree view of their customers to effectively deliver rich experiences to them.
