Last month I attended a gathering of media professionals at the Omeda OX8 Idea Exchange and the topic of driving audience growth through better data management was front and center. Information Evolution was there as a sponsor and we were in good company with fellow data pros laser-focused on using great content and emerging tools to increase their B2B services’ reach.
Among the popular data management topics were:
- Customization: Improving the customer experience requires targeting content to specific segments, increasing engagement by encouraging more audience interaction, and personalizing content wherever possible.
- Innovation: AI’s impact on the information industry cut both ways with publishers wanting to protect both their content and their customer data while audience development managers were looking for new ways to leverage emerging tools to expand their marketing reach.
- Â Accuracy: Use cases may change, but accurate B2B data remains the foundation for creating data products that offer true insight and finding audiences for those products.
Other topics included real-time analytics, brand credibility, strategic partnerships, outsourcing, data management platforms, data hygiene’s importance to the effectiveness of AI tools, smarter segmentation, minimizing list fatigue, and marketing intelligence. How to structure data correctly for AI processes surfaced as a particular challenge for many companies, and one that most in-house marketing teams are not well-equipped to handle on their own.
In the end, industry expertise, long the gateway to compelling actionable insight, remains the key to relevance in every B2B marketplace. Marketing techniques and tools always get the limelight but, in the end, unique compelling content written by humans and data services designed by subject matter experts are still the keys to the kingdom of audience development.
