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Analytics for 2019: The Ingredients of Insights

Analytics for 2019: The Ingredients of Insights

My colleague Rebecca recently penned “When To Conduct A Digital Brand Analysis” last month. She's correct -it's always a good time to conduct a digital analysis, a brand analysis (brand audit), or a customer analysis. But, what does that actually mean in 2019?

Since 2012, the marketing and technology world experienced three hype trains surrounding web analyticsbig data and machine learning/artificial intelligence. They are each related to one singular pursuit: to increase competitive advantage through marketing. Hype trains may come and go, but increasing competitive advantages have not and will not change in 2019. The data demonstrates a preference toward the slow and steady method over the hype train. According to Forrester Analytics, 57% of global data and analytics decision makers are still at the early stages of their insights-driven business transformation and fall into the beginner maturity segment. Only 8% demonstrate advanced insights-driven competencies. ¹

At Rhythm, we conduct sophisticated marketing strategies. The tactics that make up each strategy have become more sophisticated over time and they will continue to evolve throughout 2019. How will they evolve? We have fearless predictions for 2019... First, we recognize that analytics is a cyclical - not linear - process. There are no timelines and endpoints to analytics projects. There are, however, milestones. Cyclical Analytics Process

A milestone is as simple as getting to know more about your customers through analytics. To do this, you can begin to conduct your brand audit and gain insights around your customers via your analytics. Rhythm drills down into web analytics, big data, and machine learning/AI to put these key ingredients into practice:

Constant Customer Research Throughout 2018, Rhythm made customers the focus of our measurement. This included updating analytics tools and building custom dimensions and metrics to better understand customers, customer decisions, and customer journeys.

Customer Journey Mapping With those finer measurements of customers in place, customer journey mapping becomes more sophisticated. Omnichannel is default. We use statistical analysis and business intelligence to create more granular and more meaningful segments of customers. Their journeys lead to interesting - and possibly quite valuable - places.

Customer Data Integration Rhythm assists organizations in the integrations of data lakes/pools/rivers/bodies of water in the digital process. Integrated analytics has one goal: create greater wisdom of the preferences of customers.

Controlled Experimentation This process by design does not answer every question. That's where controlled experimentation comes in. Stakeholders have hypotheses on what customers do and how they act. We test for hypotheses at the decision points with statistically-significant experiments. The only goal is to continuously improve. We end up right back where we started, with another milestone, lessons learned, and recommendations to improve.

In 2019, Rhythm will continue to improve this process for our partners and their customers. We expect to be surprised and delighted by what we learn from our customers. In the next few months, we will update our case studies with the most interesting findings and share them with you.

¹ Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics Data And Analytics Survey, 2018.