In the data-driven marketing era there is no such thing like WYSIWYG

Text by: Christo Zonnev, Managing Director Interone
Algorithms are becoming a major player in marketing. In the future, they will decide which content to display where, when and to whom.
Reaching new potential customers offsite is difficult to do. Companies invest a lot of time and money in media with the goal of getting found by the right customers.
Offering the right media, to the right user, at the right time, is a near impossible task in a world that’s always logged onto multiple devices at various touchpoints.
There are many ways to reach customers where they are, however. Enter Real-Time-Advertising (RTA) and Programmatic Marketing.
The question is, what happens once the customer reaches your onsite platform?
In most cases, they will be sent to a static website. Hardwired Next-Best-Actions (NBA) and content, instead of an individual approach and content adapted to their interests and needs, is what most customers see when they visit a company’s website.
Many Content Platforms offer a broadcast radio experience, instead of a Spotify-experience.
Clearly this is a serious issue for companies who want to scale up or progress. To reach that goal, the offsite data-driven marketing approach must continue onsite too. That same thinking should be applied to the onsite platform.
Instead of manually crafting websites, marketers should focus on the content items as such. Enrich these with additional meta information and let the algorithms generate on the fly an individual output. Based on the user behaviour signals they receive. Onsite and offsite (or as we say: site-to-site). In the data-driven marketing era, there is no such thing like WYSIWYG.
Successful marketers don’t act on offsite/onsite strategies, but instead focus on a site-to-site approach.
Make no mistake, this approach is far from easy. Customer segments and customer interests are fluid. They constantly change and depend largely on context, touchpoint, and time. The result is a complexity that can no longer be mastered by humans alone. The only way to get there is to use modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The good news is these technologies are readily available.
Conclusion:
Marketers who understand and use the power of AI and ML have a competitive advantage.
Of course, this also means that in the future the decision surrounding content delivery and NBAs will be algorithm driven and not handled by humans. This is a major challenge for marketers — both in terms of skillset and mindset- — but it is an inevitable one.
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