Roadblocks to personalization and How you can solve for them.

80% of customers around the world would rather engage with brands that offer hyper-personalization. Much is said about personalization in the world of data tsunami but not many brands have been able to get it right, despite all the customer data they have at their disposal. In this article, we discuss the key barriers on the road to personalization and also, how brands can solve for them.

What's causing roadblocks on your journey to hyper-personalization

Let's first see the top three obstacles on the road to personalization that even the most data-centric marketers and brands have to face.

1) Lack of inhouse data-driven talent

Leveraging data from a variety of sources to create actionable insights requires special skills. These skills could include data engineering, analytics, and modelling talent. However, most marketing teams find it challenging to hire and retain such talent. Depending on the size of the organization, they often don't even have sufficient budgets for such in-house talent.

Without data and analytics skills in place, brands are unable to equip themselves with the ability to apply the analytics layer required for impactful personalization. Naturally, this limits brands in the value they are able to deliver through their personalization efforts.

2) Data silos

Organizations collect data from many sources, from email and CRM to social media and POS touchpoints. However, these disparate systems are not linked to each other. What then results is a whole customer data tsunami on different systems, spread among different departments, with customer data never speaking to each other. Merging all of this customer data together in order to draw actionable insights, ensuring data quality, and applying a sound governance layer on top of it is an expensive technological challenge. Many brands don't have the IT budgets to solve for this complex problem.

Add to this the problem of data sources constantly evolving and increasing. In today's day and age, brands collect significant first-party data. But they also have access to third party data enrichment solutions that inform brands and marketers about their customers' brand affinities, technographic and appographic touchpoints among various other critical data points. Merging first party data with these third-party data sources to create a holistic, single source of truth about each customer is a challenge. This single source of truth about each customer - or a unified master profile of each customer - is valuable because it takes customer data to a whole new level of granularity. A truly valuable customer profile includes data points like demographics, appographics, technographics, brand affinities, engagement levels, lifestyles and so much more and creates a unique persona for each customer. This takes personalization to a whole new level, but only after brands are able to address the challenge of bringing together all these data points to create a single profile. This requires capturing data from a variety of sources, devices, and touchpoints and needs significant technological intervention.

3) Gaps in marketing and technology integration

One of the most significant personalization needs is the ability to personalize across channels and devices. This is a rather complex ask, given that it requires the integration of technologies into the marketing stack. When marketers try to do this by themselves, their marketing stack keeps increasing in size and volume and eventually, becomes disintegrated and extremely hard to manage. Organizations might make significant financial investment in their martech stacks but lack of integration ensures that they are still unable to deliver seamless, hyper-personalized customer experience across channels and devices.

How to solve for these data challenges and personalize like a marketing rockstar

A centralized data integration mechanism to the rescue! What marketers need is a centralized data integration mechanism - like the Lifesight CI platform - which can scale with time and as data sources and volume increase. Automated platforms for data integration that ingest, clean, and prepare data for real time analytics are a must in any martech stack.

More importantly, as marketers gear up for the cookie-less digital ecosystem, modern data platforms like Lifesight will have a significant role to play. They are allowing brands to look beyond the cookie and leverage their first party data across the entire marketing value chain, especially personalization efforts. New age data and insight platforms like Lifesight are capable of gathering data from a variety of first- and third-party sources, analyzing user behaviour across channels, tracking online and offline data, applying the analytics layer on customer data, and handling and processing data from multiple sources. And they deliver all of these data capabilities without a line of code or expensive data manpower. And all of these capabilities ensure stronger, more impactful personalization across channels and devices.

Get in touch with Lifesight, we have a one-stop solution for all your data integration and personalization challenges. What are you waiting for?