Data clouds marketers
The usefulness of automated online marketing is an overblown ‘‘fallacy’’ because most consumers still purchase emotionally offline, an expert says.
Founder of multiple marketing strategy and consulting businesses, Malcolm Auld, said marketers had become overexcited and reliant on data and advertised digitally just for the sake of it.
He said machine-generated emails and targeted online advertisements were often faking sincerity.
Businesses should only advertise directly to a customer when they had something relevant to say, he said.
‘‘There is horses for courses and we forget that.’’
The internet and apps had made purchasing easier, but the fundamental principle of marketing, tapping into human emotion, had not changed, he said.
Auld said marketing’s purpose remained simple - to acquire and retain customers.
He said marketers thought automated advertising was the way of the future, but mindlessly doing it with poor copywriting could damage customer relationships and turn them off a brand.
Clicks or opened emails were not successes, sales were, Auld said.
‘‘The big mistake marketers make is they mistake distribution with what they call [customer] engagement.’’
He said digital advertising needed to be monitored by humans to ensure it was not a wasted effort.
‘‘The thing that marketers get wrong is they assume that computers can do it without humans involved.’’
Data was originally used to see sales results and trends. Auld said traditional data-driven marketing was still useful to be able to respond to sales quickly.
But in his eyes, modern marketers were too excited about its use beyond that and could be wasting money.
‘‘The cost of analysing data does not always give you an incremental increase in sales.’’
Auld said multinationals like United States consumer goods company Procter & Gamble had reportedly stripped millions from its digital marketing strategy, cutting online advertising by an estimated third, and it did not affect sales. He said he was shocked by athletic wear brand Adidas’ decision to only advertise online.
‘‘Consumers still make more unconsidered decisions… [that] do not involve technology.’’
Deciphering customers’ online habits, called data analytics, only supplied information about online shoppers.
Auld said those customers did not make up 20 per cent of most business’ sales. Analysing only their data was ‘‘naive’’ when more purchases happened offline, he said.