Will the 2020’s bring a new decade of empathy, opportunity and optimism? Our President of Enterprise Solutions, Tom Zawacki, says yes. Let’s explore why.
In 2021, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created every day. 90% of the world’s total data has been created since 2019. And this number is only expected to rise – experts predict that the volume of data we create will double every two years.1 Advertisers know more about their audiences than ever before, which gives them the opportunity to include more attributes in modeling leading to higher confidence thresholds in creating relevant connections.
The answer, Zawacki says, is use it to approach prospects from a place of empathy. “It’s time to move beyond being contextually relevant and audience-targeted to connect based on a much deeper understanding of the person as a human being. The foundation is comprehensive and accurate data, but the end goal is more nuanced and more effective than it has been in the past.” We must refine our core models to make them more accurate, and then add sentiment, life-stage, intent and moment-based attributes to account for a consumer or business customer’s rational and emotional propensity to convert. And, we have to strive for an authentic conversation with humans in a blended marketing world – blended meaning the intertwined customer offline and online customer journey, and interspersed B2C and B2B roles we all phase in and out of throughout the day.
Advertisers already know that personalization is important. 79% of organizations that exceed revenue goals report that they have a documented personalization strategy2 and, in a recent survey, 93% of B2B marketers indicated that personalizing content had increased their organization revenue over time.3 We are only 2 years in to this decade and we have seen advances in AI, marketing automation, and data modeling that are helping advertisers to get even more personalized and effective with their outreach.
Zawacki says, “These advancements are giving companies the opportunity to understand who their audience is and better connect with them. As well as the opportunity to anticipate their needs in order to design a better product and convey its value in a way that will resonate with them.”
“Augmented intelligence offers us an opportunity to be the best “us” we can be, never forgetting an important date, reducing annoying frequency levels and/or the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time (that’s right Zappo’s, the high-heels were for my wife…I swear.) Advertising from a place of empathy means understanding what the consumer is going through at any given moment, and augmented intelligence is one of the key advancements enabling us to make that approach scalable.”
It’s been a turbulent few years (both the New York Yankees and Giants have not won a championship.) But Zawacki insists that resilience and optimism are going to be the name of the game as we continue down this path. According to our business data, 2,462,416 businesses opened between March 2020 and August 2021.
“2021 was a crazy year,” Zawacki admits, “but as we changed the way we lived, people created businesses to fill the gaps. From Zoom comedy shows to apps that allowed us to play games virtually or host movie viewing parties, people took established platforms and repurposed them in order to help us stay connected, fulfilled and happy. I hope that people don’t miss that.”
1 https://www.the-next-tech.com/blockchain-technology/how-much-data-is-produced-every-day-2019/ 2 https://instapage.com/blog/personalization-statistics 3 https://www.episerver.com/reports/b2b-digital-experiences-report
Tom Zawacki is the president of Enterprise Solutions at Data Axle. He leads the vision, planning, development, and execution of next-level data and marketing solutions that provide transformational results for the company’s enterprise client base.