Last we left our brave hero, he was exploring a mobile planet where two factions existed.  One was tied to the traditional way of tracking affiliate conversions on desktop web; the other embraced a more modern approach to tracking and attributing conversions within mobile app environments.  Ideally, the two sides come together and find a single solution that embraces the best qualities of both, and we live happily ever after.  

But it is usually more complicated than that.  There are barriers to change that each side perceives as obstacles at best and deal breakers at worst.  In the second part of this short series on mobile affiliate marketing, we will dive into these perceived barriers and assess strategies to overcome them.

Barrier #1: The Organizational Walls

For most companies born before the emergence of mobile, there is an organizational challenge to solve.  Namely, mobile apps and mobile web have been tacked on as an afterthought to these organizations.  Mobile is treated as a separate entity and strategy, an offshoot from the core business and the marketing efforts for it.  

Why?  It may be that companies that did not grow up with mobile viewed its inception as an experiment or a skunkworks operation.  Until recently, organizational structures did not take into account the idea that the organizing construct is not channel, but growth.  Businesses that look at growth as the overarching goal tend to bring their mobile and desktop teams together to join forces. Companies that do not view growth in the same way tend to separate out the teams the build apps from those that drive desktop traffic.  

The bottom line is this: if you are not a mobile-first (or as we call it, a MobileBest) company, chances are your teams are built in silos.  And that mentality must change so that cross-team collaboration between user acquisition and affiliate partnerships can take shape.

Barrier #2: The Links, Stink!

The second big hurdle is finding a de facto standard of tracking and attribution between desktop and mobile.  Let’s face it, with two tracking paradigms, the links … well, stink!  

Why?  There are black holes in every corner of the cross-channel universe.  Black holes mean that partners who spent their hard-earned money on marketing on the brand’s behalf are not getting properly compensated.  And what does that do? It means that a given brand’s conversion rate looks pretty poor to those affiliates, and thus, they hold off on promoting that brand.  That’s a bad outcome no matter how you slice it.  

Legacy tracking is penalizing mobile marketers, as many Traditional Desktoppers do not believe it is possible to properly attribute mobile traffic. 

Here is the current state of the ecosystem:

• ~40% of transactions aren’t accurately tracked on mobile when relying on traditional affiliate network technology on mobile.
• Brands believe that the world of mobile attribution is too probabilistic and unreliable to use for affiliate use cases.
• Brands believe that ITP 2.X and Chrome’s restrictions have made accurate attribution impossible.  

Barrier #3: The UX, SUX!

The third hurdle that needs to be solved for is user experience.  If we are honest with ourselves, most mobile affiliate marketing experiences — sending a user from web to app, or desktop web to mobile web, or app to app — are not ideal.  Or, to be more (brutally) direct, the user experience (UX) sucks. 

A lack of sound technology solutions is deterring brands from taking time to properly integrate these landing paths.  As such, companies leave conversion rates unoptimized and limit the possibilities of properly attributing mobile traffic.  They don’t have faith in the post-click conversion funnel, and there is scant evidence that any one company has found the way to build a truly scalable solution for it.  

Many Traditional Desktoppers don’t understand (or care) how landing pages work on mobile; most hate the thought of potentially losing a customer by pushing them to download a mobile app.  But are those fears really justified?

Here’s the thing about mobile: it includes both mobile web and mobile apps. Generally, mobile apps do a better job converting users than mobile web, but not all users have your mobile app installed.  In the heat of the moment right after a click, you don’t want to fool around trying to get the user to install the app. You want them to buy, and buy now! 

Luckily, mobile measurement partners (MMPs), Apple, and Google have all already thought about this problem and have a solid solution for it.  This solution is where routing comes into play, and it involves two concepts that require some explanation. 

• Deep linking:  Deep linking lands a user in a specific location within an app or on a specific page of a website, as opposed to sending them to the app’s home screen or the website’s home page.   
• Apple Universal Links and Android App Links:  These links intelligently route a user to the optimal destination depending on whether or not a user has the relevant app installed.  For example, if you have the app on iOS, a Universal Link will land you deep within the app. If you do not have the app installed, the link will route you to a landing page on mobile web.

Thus, mobile experiences can provide the best of both worlds: a high-converting app route when the app is installed on a device, and a mobile web flow to fall back on when it’s not.  The attribution works deterministically for both!

In Addition, Mobile Affiliates and Partners Are a Mystery … 

One very practical hurdle to working more closely with mobile affiliates is a lack of familiarity with who the players are or how to form relationships with mobile developers or mobile apps. Given the mobile form factor, brands have to think differently about the creative and content that work better in native contexts.  For these companies, integrating with large mobile partners or affiliate networks can create a lot of anxiety. Do regular links even work?

Some of these fears are legitimate, but many are a function of experience.  Yes, mobile is slightly different when it comes to performance marketing. But, most of your customers’ eyeballs are already on mobile!  That means that many or most of the same partners that work for traditional web also work for mobile.

… and Mobile Fraud Scares Everyone Away

The last issue is one that has been amplified by the headlines in the news: brands are genuinely concerned about mobile ad fraud, and many feel that mobile networks are full of bad actors and are therefore untrustworthy.  

Concern is warranted.  However, much of this concern can be resolved through technology.  The key to preventing mobile fraud is truly understanding the way it works within the mobile channel.  Interestingly, mobile fraud is not that different than the kind of fraud found in the desktop ecosystem; in many cases, it’s actually the same thing just with a different name.  

Beyond transactional fraud, which is the job of the brand to police, the most relevant type of mobile ad fraud to guard against is attribution fraud, including:

• Apps and/or SDKs secretly stuffing clicks.
• Apps and/or SDKs performing click injection.
• Faked conversions via bots and device farms.
• SDK conversion spoofing.

We can help you parse through this, as we have a lot of experience dealing with all types of mobile fraud.  Head over to our blog for a whole series on it, including articles on the types of mobile fraud, the impact of click fraud, and how to prevent mobile fraud.

While fraud is never truly going to completely disappear, do not get thrown off by the headlines that tend to sensationalize the threat of mobile fraud.  Fact is, all fraud is bad fraud.  

So, Where Do We Go From Here?

Now that we have covered why advertisers need to change and the barriers that were supposedly preventing them from doing so, we’re ready to move on to making that change happen.  In Part 3 of this series, we explore how to bring together these affiliate marketing worlds by identifying the technology they share, translating the opportunities that already exist, and (re)introducing the partners that make it all possible.

Want to skip the series? Get the whole story in our e-book, “Mobile Planet: A Brave New World for Affiliate Partnerships.”

This year, TUNE is dialing up our presence at MAU to build with our network and showcase some of the solutions we’ll be focused on this year, including GDPR readiness, fraud prevention, and enhanced mobile web measurement capabilities.

Connect With Our Team

If you’re attending the show, we’d love to chat with you. We’ve been hard at work innovating beyond attribution and have plenty of updates to share. Stop by booth #604 or schedule a 1:1 meeting with us on-site.

Join Us For a Fireside Chat

In our 15-minute panel session, we’re sitting down with a few of our TUNE friends and family to talk shop about their journeys, their stories, and how they’re impacting our growth space. Joining us on Thursday at 11:20 a.m. will be Kar Paramasivam, Head of Growth at Shipt; Tim Ming, Director of Digital at American Well; and Dina Chaiffetz, Product Strategist at Prolific Interactive. 

Full panel details are below:

War Stories: Attribution, Engagement & Retention in a User-First World

Customers today move fast and brands that engage and retain them need to move faster and smarter to effectively build deep, respected connections with them. We’re bringing together a group of TUNE family and friends to compare notes, share stories from the field and elevate best practices around moving from mobile first to user-first.

Speakers:

Colin Sutton, Director of Sales, TUNE

Alec Baker, Sr. Strategy Director, TUNE

Kar Paramasivam, Head of Growth, SHIPT

Tim Ming, Director of Digital, AMERICAN WELL

Dina Chaiffetz, Product Strategist, PROLIFIC INTERACTIVE

Date: Thursday, April 26th     Time: 11:20–11:40 a.m.     Location: CRM/Room 316

Visit TUNE at Booth #604 in the Exhibition Hall from 12-6 p.m.

Come see the teams and be sure to drop your business card in our fishbowl to be entered to win an all-expenses-paid trip to Postback 2018!

You read that right: We’re flying one lucky person out to Seattle to attend our annual marketing conference, Postback. (In case you haven’t heard, it’s the mobile event of the summer.) At Postback, you’ll network until you run out of business cards, hear about the industry’s most pressing topics, and walk away inspired by sessions from the world’s top MobileBest companies. Not to mention, you can’t beat summer in Seattle.

Beyond our fireside chat session and one-on-ones, we’re leaving plenty of room for the unexpected. Here’s to a memorable time at MAU 2018 — we can’t wait to see you there!

Good news gets trumpeted from the rooftops. Bad news gets buried in the backyard.

Welcome to the backyard.

Six years ago when Scott Brinker’s martech landscape was considerably less insane — 350 marketing technology vendors rather than today’s 5,000 — and marketers were considerably less stressed out, Gartner made a prediction.

The “Martech 5000”

By 2017, Gartner said, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO.

That might actually have come true.

But it may not stay true, if marketers continue to waste 30% of their budgets. That’s what  American marketers believe will happen in 2018, according to a Rakuten Marketing report that gently landed on the wires with a very light, almost inaudible mini-thud this week.

On the positive side, 30% waste is better than John Wanamaker‘s infamous 19th-century “50% of my advertising is wasted” quote. On the negative, it’s depressing that with over 150 years of technological progress since Wanamaker we’ve only seen a 40% improvement in dollars dripping out of holes in marketing buckets.

(Yep, a 20% absolute change from 50% loss to 30% loss is a 40% improvement.)

Given that marketers think they’re going to be wasting 30% of their budgets, it is not shocking that 44% of U.S. marketers are worried about being able to prove the value of marketing. Plus, 42% are concerned about challenges in establishing a positive perception of marketing as an organization discipline.

My guess is that most departments that believe they’re going to waste 30% of their budget would have similar issues.

What’s the solution?

There’s only one.

Spray and pray?

Smart marketers know it, and have already committed to it: stopping spray and pray. Marketing that isn’t measured, can’t be viewed side-by-side with other channels in a dashboard, and isn’t attributed, is at high risk of fraud, duplication, waste, and general sub-optimal performance.

TUNE can help.

The alternative is not pretty.

We’re already in a scenario where only 9% of marketers have a marketing system of record, where global app install fraud costs app publishers up to $2 billion a year, almost nine out of ten marketers cannot consistently measure their customers’ cross-device activity, even though technology opens the door to twice as many customer journey data points.

Accurate, fast, and integrated attribution is the first key.

Engagement is the second, and mobile is a massive part of that.

But underpinning both is a commitment to measurement that guides investment. There will always be marketer dollars spent on testing new platforms, new ads, new networks, new programs. That’s not waste, however, and it’s not 30% of your budget.

I’d like to say that 2017 was a wild year where ground breaking marketing technology powered life-altering marketing campaigns, but I can’t.

There continues to be a shortage of real innovation across the mobile acquisition and engagement space as providers battle it out on a feature-to-feature basis. The result? An industry content with the status quo as marketers focus more on iterative advances and existing technologies than new solutions that push boundaries.

Despite this general stagnation, I’m hopeful that 2018 will be a breakout year for the industry, as we work to execute on three important strategies: 1. The creation of a unified, enterprise-ready mobile marketing stack that goes well beyond basic attribution; 2. Expansion of people-based marketing by further linking devices with real people so marketers can actually provide their target audiences with customized campaigns (and not just talk about doing it); and 3. A laser focus on the creation of new technologies and solutions that will enable marketers to reach new audiences at scale.

That’s what we’re up to. Here are my six predictions for 2018.

1. Acquisition and Engagement Unite!

We often talk about the all-important sales and marketing bucket here at TUNE, and how we can help our customers plug the various leaks that develop over time.

When marketers turn on the faucet of user acquisition to drive downloads, registrations, and initial engagements, a massive 80% of customers leak within the first three days, never to return. Of those who remain, another 8% are lost to fraud, meaning marketers end up with very few customers as a result of a leaky bucket.

We want to build tools to help marketers plug the leaks. But before we do it’s really important to understand what creates the leaks in the first place: an overinvestment in acquisition without a corresponding focus on retention via engagement.

In 2018, marketers will take a more holistic approach to balancing new customer acquisition with engagement and as a result improve retention. As they do, they’ll design higher-performance campaigns that are more focused, engaging, and context-relevant. In short, they will become MobileBest marketers.  

2. Marketing Not Held Accountable Will Dwindle

I mention this every year, and I’ll continue doing so well into the future, but it’s time the mobile industry *finally* delivers more for consumers and enterprises.

To get there, we need certain patterns of media buying to officially die off. Slinging display ads with no performance measurement will become a small game, dependent purely on sales tactics and relationships. Companies are already demanding that their marketing teams measure performance in order to demonstrate fiscal accountability, and that trend will fully take root in 2018. This will become especially notable once enterprise companies unlock the revenue predictability and scale that performance provides.

This means we’ll see a transformation in programmatic and large scale media buying as a result of solid measurement. We have the technology to track results at scale, so there’s no reason why marketers can’t deliver great results to consumers and enterprises alike.

3. The Year Mobile Breaks Through in Enterprise

Enterprises realize that mobile is mainstream, and we’ve done the research to prove that focusing on mobile increases company value. They’ve also discovered that their teams may not have the deep expertise or tools to win because yesterday’s digital campaigns don’t translate to today’s mobile demands. This is a massive opportunity for vendors who can deliver enterprise-level capabilities across marketing touchpoints.

I see it in our own customer growth and it is a consistent theme across mobile marketing vendors and companies I talk to. Enterprise companies are diving into mobile, signing up for new tools and software, and preparing to compete with mobile-first companies in 2018. They’re committing to big software contracts and showing incredible plans for their mobile marketing budgets. Many are moving from tiny investments in mobile to what will be the largest in their marketing mix. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve seen Fortune 100 companies involved in mobile for years now, but the amount of commitment and investment is going up dramatically.

The hidden challenge for enterprise companies is marketing talent. They’re working from a cast of digital marketers that don’t speak the language of mobile, and it’s slowing down their journey. In short, if you’re a mobile user acquisition specialist, your career in enterprise is about to blossom.

There’s also a disconnect when it comes to the maturity of big-box marketing cloud vendors, who designed and built great web marketing offerings but are scrambling to bolt on mobile offerings in order to compete with mobile-first startups. Enterprise marketers will adopt technology that unites the best of big box marketing cloud tech with innovative startup tech into one package. This space will be won by the company that provides top notch service, support, up-time, and security (things you get from a big-box cloud) with new super useful products and new features delivered at a rapid pace.

4. Walled Gardens Begin to Erode

In some categories such as elimination of fraud and the erosion of walled gardens, 2018 will be a year of addition by subtraction; in others like OTT (over the top) and voice, it will be a year of reaching audiences across more channels than ever before. In all cases, a catalyst will be technology that consolidates perspectives and enables more informed action.     

Today, “walled gardens” like Google and Facebook generate an incredible volume of data on individuals through search, display, social connections and likes. Today these worlds are separate, making it increasingly difficult for marketers to reconcile performance across multiple platforms.

Within the next five years, Google and Facebook will begin sharing data and showing marketers a more complete picture of measurable results. They will do this through siloed, protected analytics environments, measured by third parties capable of ensuring unbiased accuracy.

In 2018, we’ll also see more experiments and “frenemy” partnerships, the first of which was recently announced when Salesforce and Google agreed to partner to help marketers get a more complete and accurate assessment of the impact of their spend. This is a clear indication of what’s to come.

The world is more open and collaborative and as a result value will migrate to solutions that connect and unify rather than those that remain divided (and create unnecessary work for their customers).

5. Streaming Video (OTT) and Voice Technology Show Their Potential

As mentioned above, OTT and voice are helping marketers reach target audiences in new and innovative ways. It’s early for OTT and voice platforms like FireTV, AppleTV, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Echo and Google Home but they will unlock a broader set of audiences and channels for marketers to test and explore. In 2018, streaming video and voice technology will explode in marketing popularity as more native advertising opportunities are made available.  

Voice will move a bit slower in 2018 because its economic potential has not yet fully materialized the way it has for OTT within the ecommerce sector, for example. However, marketers must make more investments in understanding the consumer experience on Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Siri, and I expect there will be some shining examples as a result. This is going to be fun.

6. Marketers Get a Handle on Fraud and Realize They Need Quality Supply

A major topic for marketers in 2017 was ad fraud, and every attribution technology provider worth their salt scrambled to carve out their own story. At TUNE, our customers helped us innovate massively on our fraud solutions. We needed a new level of publisher granularity as well as the tools to make it simple to cut out everything suspicious. I’m really proud of the collaboration and think the results speak for themselves. On top of all that, the platforms are becoming more active. For example, Android launched a new API that we jumped on to eradicate fraudulent click injection.  

For technology providers, the focal point will be improving the experience for marketers in dealing with fraud and arbitrating with partners (think more automated actions and identified rules).

Because fraud is easier to identify and manage, marketers will be willing to pay more for quality supply. Enter Amazon, Apple, Snap, etc.

Marketers will continue to maximize monthly performance with Facebook and Google and will look to increase spend on other channels, from ad networks to exchanges. They’ll be hungry for more native advertising from sources such as Apple Search and Snapchat. This will cause inventory prices to climb and will open the door for new contenders. One of those contenders will be Amazon.

Wrap Up

The mobile marketing industry is primed for change and I’m confident we’ll see it in 2018. Too many forces are at work for significant advances not to reach critical mass and begin truly transforming how marketers identify and engage their audiences. In summary, I’ll be shocked if 2018 is a repeat performance of the past year.  

The TUNE team and I will be doing our part to introduce new technology and shape the future of our industry. We know it will be challenging and invite you to join us for the ride.  

Have a prediction? Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think will happen in 2018.

Image source: Pixabay

How do you boost marketing efficiency 35%, 150%, or even an absurd 680%? Simple: you do what top marketers like Sandra Rand have done.

Which is: synergize paid, earned, and owned marketing channels.

As top marketers have learned, blending marketing campaigns across both paid and organic boosts both, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways. Conversely, treating each channel as individual and separate costs marketers massive savings, much-needed insights, and huge potential upside.

Last week we looked at the results this generates: almost pure alchemy. This week, we’ll look at why channel synergy works.

This is part two of a five-part series on Better Together: The elements of paid & organic marketing
Get the entire free report now

Let’s start at the beginning …

Marketers, customers, and journeys

We know that 86% of marketers can’t consistently measure their customers’ cross-device activity. We also know that marketers believe that technology, used properly, can double their visibility of the customer journey. And that significant real-time visibility into your customers’ journeys should yield significantly better marketing ROI: 70% better, to be precise.

Image source: Pixabay

Similar parallels exist for organic and paid marketing.

And they’re very relevant to channel synergy.

It’s hard for marketers to measure how organic and paid media interact. Marketers implicitly know, however, that they do, and that the interaction can be very, very positive. And marketers generally believe that mixing paid and organic results in significantly better ROI.

In addition, as prospects navigate in and around paid and organic marketing, each presents different and significant steps in the customer journey.

Global channel synergy: Common sense

It’s common sense that owned, earned, and paid are synergistic. Most marketers would agree.

“Think of paid media as the quarterback and earned and owned as the offensive line,” says Mike Gilloon, Director of Strategic Communications at Bozell. “Like paid media, the quarterback is very important and often gets most of the attention. But he’s not very effective without a strong offensive line.”

This ground truth assumption is why we do PR and brand marketing.

“When someone searches in Google or sees an ad on Facebook they are going to click on the companies that have the best reputation,” says Ismael El-Qudsi, co-founder and CEO of Internet Republica. “For instance, if you are going to buy a pair of sneakers you will most likely prefer to click on a Nike ad versus an ad from a less-known brand.”

There’s psychology behind this as well as reasoning, says Amber Kemmis, VP of Client Services at SmartBug Media.

And dating logic, apparently:

“People don’t respond to product or service pitches. You have to ease them into the relationship versus a proposal on the first date … good things come to those who wait.”

In other words, you’re not converting a customer on the first interaction. Performance marketing follows brand marketing, because people buy from companies they know and trust.

(Ultimately, of course, all marketing is performance marketing, but we can get into that later.)

Image source: Pixabay

How paid influences organic

Customers usually don’t buy on a first date, and that behavior increases with price point and risk. Mixing paid and organic expands your brand footprint and customer touchpoints, and the result is better, more effective marketing.

Brand umbrellas

One way paid media influences organic marketing is with a brand umbrella.

Image source: Apple

Unknown brands are risky. And while organic growth is slow, paid serves as a shortcut to build a baseline of familiarity. Jason Parks, President of The Media Captain, says this is critical in building organic inquiries.

“Paid ads have been a big reason for the constant uptick in organic because people will hit our website, drop off, remember the brand name, then conduct an organic search … and convert,” he says.

Sometimes organic feeds organic, too.

“When you put a product on Amazon, it often populates on Google’s organic searches, which makes it synergistic,” Parks adds.

Retargeting or remarketing can build relationships, marketing experts say. It can also be valuable throughout the customer journey, even if retargeted ads are not click or last touch events before customer acquisition, says Shanti Shunn, a digital marketing strategist at Vizion Interactive.

“Remarketing is definitely a channel that, while it may not drive direct business, it may, like social media, continue to create a business to consumer (or potential consumer) relationship. In that respect, display advertising can also work to reinforce other channels.”

Signaling factors and higher ranking

Many modern marketplaces use signalling factors to understand consumer behavior, and then reflect that back to the market in terms of top lists, bestsellers, and factors that build into organic placement.

One of those signalling factors is sales velocity, and it’s especially important in the App Store and Google Play.

“Any impact you have on driving quality velocity will help with organic ranking,” says Patrick Haig, Director of Product Management at TUNE.

Similar things are true in marketplaces like Amazon, or Google/Bing search results, which are essentially marketplaces for answers. Additional volume driven by paid media results in additional consumer interest and activity, results in better organic placement, results in a spiralling synergistic impact.

Message testing

Many marketers will try new messaging in a small but statistically significant paid media test. Messaging that resonates can then be funneled back into organic marketing, such as cornerstone blog posts.

Parks, from The Media Captain, explains:

“Paid advertising gives you so much insight into keyword data,” he says. “You can analyze this keyword data and utilize it for the SEO keywords you sprinkle throughout your site.”

The insights you gain aren’t only usable on the web: they can also be used in TV advertising, display advertising, outdoor marketing, and more. Essentially, running A/B and multivariate tests on multiple forms of messaging via paid advertising can help you rapidly try dozens of words, phrases, and images.

Mobile marketers:
User acquisition is great. Getting more organic users is even better. And engaging deeply is best of all.
Get the entire free report now

Marketers can then use the insights in organic marketing like blog posts, organic social postings, guest posts, PR, and more, and be fairly certain their messages will resonate.

Synergistic impact: Double whammy

Sometimes, the simple fact that running paid alongside organic boosts the opportunity for people to see your brand and connect with your company is the deciding factor.

Even when your conversions happen offline.

That’s something Shanti Shunn from Vizion Interactive recently found:

“One large B2B supply company had a large percentage of sales that happen offline as well as online. The customers can take over 60-plus days to complete a purchase. We tested running slimmer on paid search after a huge surge on organic, and what we saw was very interesting … after about 30 days, offline sales began to experience a severe drop. What we realized was that the combination of [less paid search and] strong organic search positions for strategic keywords was not enough to keep the brand in the consumer’s mind. They needed to see it on individual product keywords, names, color variations, et cetera. And, that both channels essentially fed the funnel for both online and offline sales. We re-increased paid search, and within about 15 days they started to see online and call volumes pick back up. Because of that test, they decided to add an additional 30% spend to the next year’s paid search.”

Image source: Pixabay

How organic influences paid

Organic marketing efforts also have a positive complementary impact on paid marketing performance.

Cheaper advertising

One place that’s particularly clear is app store optimization, particularly on the iOS App Store but also on Google Play. Good organic rankings, which marketers can obtain by strategically constructing their app titles, descriptions, keywords, videos, and more, result in increased opportunity and lower costs in paid marketing.

“If you rank highly, you might get the top slot in Apple Search Ads,” says TUNE’s Patrick Haig. “And you may pay less than others who want the same slot, but are not as organically relevant.”

Similar things happen in web search:

“I have found time and time again that the better your organic rankings and traffic, the more platforms will favor you, giving you lower costs per click and ultimately more exposure,” says digital marketing consultant Anthony Mancuso.

Essentially, the (organically) rich get (paid) richer.

“If users engage with an ad on Facebook or Twitter, for example, their friends and followers see those likes, shares, comments, or retweets on paid advertising, making the paid ad budget go further,” says Sandra Rand, VP of Marketing at OrionCKB.

And that, of course, makes your effective return on ad spend higher than you would ordinarily expect.

‘Free’ A/B testing

Organic results often highlight areas of prime opportunity in paid marketing.

In the mobile app space, for instance, you can use an ASO tool to understand what keywords your app is ranking for … and how critical they are to your success. You can even judge the value of different customers based on what keywords they used to find you.

Then you can take that organically-generated information elsewhere.

“Now you can layer that information into social buys, search buys, and mobile ad network buys,” Haig says. And, of course, use an attribution tool to measure and contrast the performance of each channel you’re testing.

A/B and multivariate testing isn’t just limited to app store optimization, of course. It’s also extremely helpful in deciding which social messages to amplify.

Derrik Haynie, CEO of Vulpine Interactive, explains:

“I can’t tell you the client, but they have a highly engaged [Facebook] page in the beauty industry. They would release videos that would get 30,000 views in a few hours. We were able to take their top performing posts, put $50 behind the post, and more than quadruple views, comments, shares, and engagements overall.”

Social networks and content platforms already have a built-in incentive to promote engaging content. You can use that incentive, Haynie says, to get your cost per view or cost per engagement down to fractions of a penny.

“Paid traffic was able to extend the reach and keep the virality going, while organic shares was the main goal of the campaign and what drove a majority of the video views over the first few days of the campaign as it went viral,” he says. “A good video should be getting about 50% organic to paid.”

Consumer perception

Organic placement has a big effect on consumer perception in web search as well, says Laura Simis of Coalmarch, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based agency.

“Our analytics have shown that as mobile search has increased over the last 24 months, so has the number of same-day, repeat visits from potential leads,” she says. “These users are looking for an answer, but they’re not going to just pick the top choice that Google spits back at them. Many of them go looking for social proof or additional signals that the ad they were just shown is a reputable company. This is primarily where presence in the organic results can have a big impact on conversion.”

This is clear in many facets of marketing.

A company that a consumer can’t easily find in a Google search is not one that buyers will have a lot of faith in. TV ads can create the impression of a larger company with bigger budgets and trustworthy solutions. Radio can play a role. And influencer marketing can make something new and unfamiliar a little safer for new customers to take a chance on.

“Organic marketing efforts … add a layer of credibility — particularly earned media — when third parties position them in a positive light or give them a platform for thought leadership,” says Rand of OrionCKB, a marketing agency in Massachusetts. “So when audiences see an ad for something they may have seen on the Today Show or read about in Wired, they’re a bit more primed to pay attention to the ad than they may have been otherwise.”

66% of people in a 2015 Nielsen Global Trust survey said they trust earned media in the form of newspaper articles and editorial content, says Hector Gonzalez, COO of MESH, a branding agency.

And even more trust the recommendations and opinions of key influencers, says Talaya Waller, a branding expert.

“92% of people trust recommendations from other people, including brand ambassadors, advocates, thought leaders, and journalists … more than paid media. Organic media can be used to prove the validity of paid media.”

Larger segments of interest

Smart marketers realize that as they come to interact digitally with customers and potential customers, they increase their potential reach by mixing channels. That’s exactly what Rand has done at OrionCKB.

“Any organic traffic sent to the company’s website helps build retargeting audiences for paid advertising, and these can even be further segmented based on the pages they’ve viewed on that site or actions they’ve taken, such as adding to cart,” Rand says.

Result marketers can generate

Channel synergy results in massive marketing ROI gains. Marketers we’ve talked to have reported as high as 10X or 1000% improvements.

But what about Sandra Rand, who I mentioned at the top of this post?

Rand found a way to combine organic social with paid social to drive ecommerce purchases on the web up by 680%. That’s truly impressive … and it’s not even the most impressive example we found.

Get all the channel synergy examples, case studies, and data in my latest report. It’s freely available from TUNE.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping both martech and adtech. It’s creating new experiences we could never create with convention technology, and it’s enabling new insights we’ve never before been given a chance to see.

Last week TUNE partnered with Google to highlight some of those experiences and insights, and you can listen to the entire conversation here.

One of the key places machine learning is helping marketers?

Understanding the customer journey.

Knowing where your customers come from, and how they come to make a purchase decision for your product, service, or subscription, is critical. In fact, it’s so critical that marketers tell us that better customer journey visibility would improve their marketing ROI by a staggering 70%.

Understanding your customers’ journeys starts with attribution: a way to see how customers interact with the channels and messages you are using.

Starting with attribution

From a TUNE perspective, we can tell mobile app publishers where their users (or customers) came from. We can also tell retailers when their customers show up in their physical stores, when they’re nearby, and what they’re buying … and marketers of all kinds what customer outreach had an impact.

So we can highlight and surface key events in the customer journey across web and email and SMS and just about any channel you can think of, which means you are capturing the data that will help you illuminate the customer journey.

Machine learning and Universal App Campaigns

From a Google perspective, machine learning is helping marketers find new customers — and app installs — across five platforms with more than a billion users … without marketers having to customize ads on each of them separately.

It’s called UAC, or Universal App Campaigns, and it’s just one thing Google’s working on that uses machine learning to optimize your adspend across Google Play, Google Search, YouTube, Google Display Network, and more.

Google’s product director for Mobile App Ads, David Mitby, explains in the webinar how Google analyzes hundreds of millions of signals to find the best app users and customers for your app … and your business.

In other words, it’s not just one-dimensional anymore.

It’s not just age, gender, app category, or even look-alike audiences, such as an app that people have used or installed. Instead, it’s signals from search, from videos viewed, from sites viewed, from apps installed, and many other sources that combine together to generate a likelihood of interest.

The result, Mitby says, is that you find more of the customers that matter to your business … whether it’s app-only with in-app purchases, or app-enhanced with significant offline revenue.

Emergent customer journeys: AI is the guide

Marketers know that customer journeys are getting more complex every day. Marketers also know that they do not have a good track record of understanding customer journeys and optimizing brand touch points for accelerating those trips.

In fact, fewer than 15% of marketers say they can accurately measure customers as they transition between phones, tablets, and desktops. And we haven’t even started talking about smartwatches or smart cars or other connected platforms, like Alexa or Google Home.

Marketers want to see the journey so they can enhance it. Impact it. Affect it.

That’s where machine learning can play a role.

AI will help us see what I call the emergent customer journey. Most current journey builders map the customer journey and expect customers to follow the map. But future customer journey tools will be emergent: watching mobile moments, seeing app engagements, email opens, clicks, attention, requests for information, visits, purchases, and so much more.

They’ll respond when prospects and customers raise their hands. They’ll measure what happens, when, and where. The result, visualized over time, is the emergent customer journey.

At TUNE, we’re already starting to enable that with TUNE People Services and more I can’t talk about now. Expect more details over the next year.

Customers are more than acquisition

But that journey doesn’t end with an app install. It doesn’t end with a purchase. It lives on with engagement … which is why there’s a tool for precisely that in TUNE’s marketing console.

And machine learning will be busy here too, understanding your customers, seeing their actions, and recommending your best course of action.

Get the full story

To get the full story, watch the free webinar here.

How do you decide how much to spend on mobile web marketing and how much to spend on mobile app install marketing?

You have a limited marketing budget and you want the most return out of it. You want immediate ROI, sure, but you also want to set yourself up for the long term by enhancing and growing owned assets.

And … you want to know: should you focus on app installs, or one-off product sales?

A large business-to-consumer TUNE client recently asked me this question, wondering if there are industry standards or benchmarks around this. Sadly, they don’t really exist … but there are guidelines that can help enterprises and brands navigate challenging mobile marketing waters.

Here’s how I answered …

For background, this was a well-known brand that does business in-store, online, via their mobile app, and via Google Assistant/Google Home. Different businesses with different go-to-market strategies will, undoubtedly, come up with different answers. And, while the question was “mobile web ads” versus app install ads, the reality is that the difference here is between mobile ads in general, and those which are focused specifically on app installs.

Mobile web and apps are not enemies

First of all, I would not oppose mobile web and mobile app marketing efforts. They are two parts of one combined effort: finding new customers and extending relationships with existing customers.

But for most marketers, they definitely have different roles.

For starters, I might go 50/50 on the budget and then run tests, adjusting depending on results.

Fitting the funnel: web and apps

Because mobile web is often top of funnel, I would consider focusing non-app-install mobile marketing on immediate wins.

That means marketing specific products, specific sales … anything that acts as a relationship starter. My marketing messages might be something in this flavor: best, unique, fastest, with messages like “best widget cheaper” or “widget only available here.”

Because mobile app engagement, on the other hand, is generally middle to bottom of funnel, I would focus my mobile app install marketing on customer experience, ease, immediacy of access, and complete service.

My messages would be around what power, ability, and capability customers could unlock with our app … things like “total access to the best deals all the time” or “know first”  or “first access … first in line for exclusive deals.”

The key here is understanding how to initiate a relationship versus knowing how to deepen a relationship.

Targeting and retargeting

I would spread my non-app-install ads ads to everyone in my target demographics, and narrow that down as learnings accumulate in my analytics.

I would then retarget my app install campaigns to customer segments of my visitors/users/buyers, and probably some segments that I think my competitors are going for. Like mobile web ads, I’d narrow down my targeting finer as learnings accumulate.

The key understanding here is that installing an app is a significant effort.

It takes time, there are multiple steps, and there are potential leaks in the chain of customer action at easily five or six places, including completing the request for the install, waiting for the download, opening the app, moving the icon to a specific, useful place rather than just leaving it where iOS or Android placed it, and using the app regularly.

Because of this, I would start with mobile web, where the ask is much lower effort: tap a link, see a web page. Simple, quick, easy. Once you have a customer, I would love to upsell that customer on becoming loyal, engaged, and tightly connected with me.

And, apps fit that bill to a T.

Measure everything

I would measure everything on both my app install ads and my standard mobile ads, and adjust my spend based on financial results. The key thing here, of course, is to track the customer journey of your most valuable customer segments, and then try to replicate that path with new customers.

If going straight to apps provides greater profitability: fine. If sticking with standard mobile advertising works best for my brand and my customers: fine.

What works is good.

Synergies: marketing is better together

It’s really, really critical, however, to understand that all marketing happens in context, and synergies are available everywhere.

Mobile ads generate brand awareness, which impacts your ability to get the install when you run app install ads. App install ads themselves impact brand awareness, of course, as well as driving install behavior. Plus, organic and paid marketing channels are synergistic. That means that your ASO, or app store analytics, should be aligned with other marketing messages in brand and performance advertising.

Perhaps most importantly, while acquisition is the beginning, a long-term customer relationship is the result of engagement.

That engagement and that relationship is what drives loyalty and share of wallet, and can make the difference between $3 spent on an acquired app user (worth $0) and $3 spent on a new customer (worth $100s). This engagement consists of good onboarding, judicious push and in-app messaging, and smart cohorting/segmenting resulting in personalization or at least customization of your customer experience.

And that’s what can make a big difference.

. . .

. . .

I’d love to hear your thoughts on balancing app install and standard mobile marketing campaigns, and how you’ve managed them in the past. Feel free to add some tips in the comments.

In Forrester’s recent report, “Mobile-First is Not Enough,” Forrester gave some sobering statistics: even a decade after the introduction of the iPhone, only 32% of marketers have systematically integrated mobile into their marketing approach, and less than 56% say they use mobile to transform the customer experience.

The problem with those statistics, of course, is that mobile is where your customers are. More than a third of the world’s entire population now owns a smartphone, and the numbers are only poised to increase. That means if you’re not focused on being MobileBest, you’re risking falling behind. In this blog post, we’ll break down the key takeaways from the report — including steps you can take to become MobileBest.

Important Takeaways from Forrester’s New Report: Mobile-First Is Not Enough

Most marketers are still mobile-first.

If you’re still mobile-first, you’re not alone. Forrester reports that only 38% of marketers are using mobile to transform their business, 13% of respondents consider their marketing

organizations to be mobile-savvy, and 43% of marketers don’t measure the ROI of their mobile marketing campaigns. We’ll be the first to admit: thinking MobileBest requires a whole different approach than mobile-first. But it’s a worthwhile shift, and it’s possible with the suggestions below.

Don’t just change the size; change the experience.

Forrester found that many marketers simply reduce the size of an ad to fit mobile screens, and consider that optimizing for mobile. But that’s limiting the potential mobile can have for your brand. Customers interact with their mobile phones differently than they do while browsing on their computers or shopping in stores. As such, you should really think about all the ways you can engage customers with advertisements on mobile — or use it to make their lives better. Airlines have done it with mobile boarding passes; banks allow people to deposit checks via photo. What do you (or could you) do?

Ensure your entire company is designed to be MobileBest.

Once you think of mobile as more than just one of your marketing channels and as the marketing channel, your company is going to have to change at all levels within the organization. Make sure your IT department is staffed to handle the technology requirements, that your marketing team knows the nuances of mobile measurement (hint: it’s more than just new app users), and that your on-the-ground teams are equipped to handle the new experiences that you’re driving mobile customers to.

Think outside the app.

Just having an app is very mobile-first thinking. The reality is that most consumers use just a few apps — and they’re dominated by social media, email, and messaging. If you’re outside that box, you’re going to have to think outside of it, too. Consider other ways you can reach customers, whether through a compelling mobile website, use of GPS or camera, or other unique services. Forrester recommends conducting ethnographic or “ride along” studies to understand how mobile adds value throughout the customer journey.

You’re One Click Away From MobileBest

At TUNE, we coined the term MobileBest and have been talking about it for well over a year. If you want to see how we help enterprise companies move beyond mobile-first to become MobileBest, check out our customer stories or get started with a free trial today.

What will marketing tech look like 10 years?

In this series on customer journeys, we’ve talked about the thousand-step customer journey. We investigated how marketers are doubling visibility of that journey, via technology. We saw that 9 out of 10 marketers can’t consistently measure cross-device activity. And, we calculated that less than 9% of marketers actually own a marketing system of record.

But what about the future?

This is part five of a five-part series on customer journeys in a #MobileBest world
Read part one, part two, part three, and part four
Get the entire free report now

We surveyed 647 marketers about the value, technology, and problems with customer journeys. We also asked marketing influencers — including media, analysts, CMOs, and journalists — how customer journeys work, what’s wrong with them, and if marketers should even bother.

Here are three ways the marketing tech of tomorrow will change.

Valerian & the city of a thousand channels

Merging moments & offers

Owned data in a central repository

AI & the emergent customer journey

This has been part five of a five-part series on customer journeys in a #MobileBest world
Get the entire free report now

Customer journey mapping is hard. Every marketer who has tried knows this.

And technology has been a mixed blessing here, because what technology gives on the one hand: additional information, mapping tools, and customer data platforms, it takes on the other. Mobile, cross-device journeys, cross-platform journeys … stitching it together is hard.

Having a single marketing system of record is a big missing piece.

But there are also some big changes happening to martech and adtech which make customer journeys challenging.

This is part four of a five-part series on customer journeys in a #MobileBest world
Read part one, part two, and part three
Get the entire free report now

We surveyed 647 marketers about the value, technology, and problems with customer journeys. We also asked marketing influencers — including media, analysts, CMOs, and journalists — how customer journeys work, what’s wrong with them, and if marketers should even bother.

As we surveyed marketers on customer journeys, mapping, and technology, more than a few interesting — and unexpected — insights emerged. And, some new opportunities popped up.

Here are a few of them …

Brand & performance have merged

Clearly, marketers are thinking that brand advertising and performance marketing rank equally in the traditional awareness stage of the customer journey.

Also clear: Marketers now expect brand campaigns to return positive ROI, not just positive vibes. And performance campaigns need to boost the brand, not just make money.

There’s a hole in the funnel: Consideration, intent, purchase

“The most influenceable and most valuable is the loyalty phase, and yet arguably the one most neglected and underfunded. The data points proving this out are rife, and yet it doesn’t seem like the trend changes much – discrete teams are responsible for discrete phases of the life cycle even though each phase has an impact on the others.”Cory Munchbach, VP Marketing at BlueConic, former Forrester analyst

Modern customers pop up on companies’ websites, in their mobile apps, on their social feeds and outposts, in their email, in their stores, and in multiple other places both digital and offline. In addition, smart marketers look for data deeper into the customer journey, post-sale, so they can measure customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, and likelihood of customers becoming advocates. So marketers need data about product usage, service issues, and more.

All that data needs to come together in one place — literally or via API — so marketers have a complete view of their customer across the entire marketing and product lifecycles, and can make it actionable via technologies of engagement in mobile, on the web, in email, and all the other ways that companies communicate to prospects and customers.

That is a single marketing system of record.

The reality, however, is that very, very few marketers actually possess it today.

This has been part four of a five-part series on customer journeys in a #MobileBest world
Get the entire free report now

The topic next time in part five? The Marketing Tech of the Future.

The rise of “mobile first” companies has changed the way people watch, listen, play, and buy. Companies like Uber, Instagram, Tinder, and HotelTonight — companies born in a mobile era — disrupted business models and dominated the mobile experience.

However, the halcyon days of app discovery is ending, driven by app store saturation and the accompanying cost barrier associated with convincing audiences to download more apps. Not all is lost, a new opportunity to capture attention, streamline engagement, and build life-long brand loyalty exists.

It’s not just mobile first marketers who have noticed that app downloads are slowing. Long standing brands are feeling the app download pinch too and are searching for mobile marketing best practices and new ad partners in hopes of jumpstarting downloads. The real question they are trying to uncover though is this: are the rumors of the death-of-the-app true?

Sound shocking? It shouldn’t be, we live in times of increasing marketing complexity and noise. Once, digital meant desktop. Now, digital means mobile. But just like radio still matters, desktop still matters. Other channels matter too, and new tools and technologies such as smartwatches, smart TVs and over-the-top add-ons to TVs, wearable tech, and voice-first smart digital agents reinforce this point.

Cutting through the noise

In all the noise, brands need to keep one simple rule in mind: What’s best for your customer is what’s best for your brand. That’s the essence behind a new concept — MobileBest — the ability to engage with customers in the most impactful way, be it on the web, mobile web, in-app or on  other emerging channels. Being Mobilebest brings the best of all channels together while keeping  the most ubiquitous and personal computing platform ever created, mobile, at the core of every marketing program.

TUNE is on a mission to help brands  become MobileBest. We see ‘’mobile’’ as web and app, not just app. Apps deliver customer insights, customer engagement, and customer share-of-wallet in a direct and powerful way. They also provide instant and real-time updates to your customers on a one-to-one basis. But apps alone do not make for successful marketing.

As the top mobile marketer at GameSpot told us, his mobile-app customers are more valuable than top level customers in the company’s loyalty program. Savvy brands, like GameSpot, see the app as a retention tool (i.e. new customers migrating to the app from the initial web experience) and use the web and mobile web as a discovery and new customer acquisition channel.

The MobileBest reality: apps + web + mobile web =  discovery and loyalty

Because we’re nearing peak app, it’s’ not realistic to expect that everyone is going to install an app for every brand they do business with. In fact, very few will. So your mobile web experience needs to be top-notch. In a MobileBest world, the mobile web is for prospects, casual customers and some loyalists while the app is for loyalty, engagement and retention.

When melded into one cohesive strategy, mobile web and apps cater to different customers needs. This is especially true when trying to capitalize on new technology coming our way like voice search  devices like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, connected TV’s and chat bots.

In a recent TUNE report of Fortune 1,000’s companies who are mobile leaders improve valuations by 8-15% more than mobile laggards. We also saw that companies who prioritize mobile are almost twice as likely to be extremely successful financially as well, while the worst have only a 20% chance.

Many FTSE 100 companies have been around the block. They make actual, real, physical products. Their products are industrial, B2B, or resource-based. And yet, these companies have a modern mindset. They think deeply about technology. They build and deliver modern mobile apps. They ensure their websites work great on mobile devices. In short, they understand MobileBest, even though they are not mobile first.

From acquisition to engagement, three tips to be MobileBest

The average UK mobile users spend 66 hours per month browsing the web via mobile device, yet despite the time spent on mobile, competition to get that same mobile user to download an app is fierce. There are an estimated 5M mobile apps to choose from and with only 10-15 cm’s to play with, it’s really difficult to pack amazing purchasing or ad moments into such a small bit of digital real estate.

This is where app search, app store analytics and optimization play a vital role in winning and keeping mobile users. To win mobile users you have to win in search first. To crack the top 150 apps in the Google Play store, app marketers need to use 15-25 different search terms to grab enough users. For the iOS store it’s more like 25+ terms to crack the top 150 apps in a given category. Savvy app marketers use app store optimization software to do keyword analysis to figure out what people are searching for and then optimize accordingly.

1. Organic

Organic traffic is the most valuable traffic as intent is high, conversions in-app will be high as well.

There are tools you can use to optimise your titles, keywords and description. You can run experiments using Google or TUNE to optimise your design assets. The app store listing should be optimised as much as your web homepage to maximise conversion.  

2. Marketing acquisition

Make sure you have an attribution tool to measure quality and effectiveness of the various channels you use.  Make the most of your own assets (website, customer support, social communities, and shops) this will give you loyal customer at very low cost. Paid acquisition should look at quality of traffic beyond the install. Did you acquire a potential customer or a pool of dead downloads? There are a lot of partners out there ready to sell you installs at good CPI, but quality isn’t always there so be clear about your KPI and optimise, optimise, optimise.

3. Marketing retention

Don’t  be fooled, a  download does not represent a user or a customer. Engagement and retention is the key to success, especially when you consider that two thirds of a potential users cohort doesn’t come back to the app a week after the downloads. App onboarding requires a product tutorial, CRM push and paid advertising. The goal is to build engagement until the magic moment where customers “can’t live without” your app takes place.

The app marketer’s mission

Our advice to app developers is to make a great app that makes customer’s lives better. If you haven’t done that, then don’t bother marketing it. Once you’ve built something that’s truly great, take a MobileBest approach to marketing it — configure your marketing efforts to catch people in app, in others apps that use deep links or on the mobile web. The goal is to build a connected set of touchpoints with your mobile customers that reinforce how great the app is, and keep them coming back for more.

You want to understand your customers, which means you want to understand their journey. How do they become customers, and what steps do they follow on their path? And, is digital compressing the traditional marketing funnel from weeks to days, even hours, as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has suggested?

This is part three of a five-part series on customer journeys in a #MobileBest world
Read part one, part two, or part four
Get the entire free report now

We surveyed 647 marketers about the value, technology, and problems with customer journeys. We also asked marketing influencers — including media, analysts, CMOs, and journalists — how customer journeys work, what’s wrong with them, and if marketers should even bother.

Mobile and other new technologies make customer journey mapping more challenging, because they increase the number of options.

But they can also make it simpler.

First, let’s briefly look at the challenges.

The 86% problem: Cross-device multiplied by cross-platform

Marketers have seen the challenge: A visitor on a website might be the same as a visitor on a mobile website might be the same as a mobile app user, but it’s hard to tell. This leads to 86% of marketers saying that they are unable to reliably measure their customers’ cross-device activity:

And, in fact, it’s much more challenging than just cross-device tracking, because there’s also cross-platform on single devices.

Just think: On a desktop computer, you might touch a potential customer …

• on your website
• via email
• on Twitter or Facebook
• on a third-party product review website
• via a messaging platform or service

Similarly, on a mobile phone, you might touch a customer:

• in your app
• on your mobile website
• on a social network
• via an email
• via SMS or another messaging platform

Combine those options, many of which occur in real-world scenarios, and you’ve got thousands of potential journeys in a customer’s exploration of your brand and your products across desktop, mobile, real world, social shares, face-to-face word of mouth, smart TV, wearable technology, and other channels and waypoints.

Stewart Rogers

De-duplicating all of these touches and resolving them down to a single individual is a massive task.

“Just as we start to get closer to hyper-personalization, and 1:1 marketing, new devices and channels appear that make it almost impossible to understand who is using the device. Smart TVs and connected cars do not identify an individual persona in the same way a smartphone, tablet, or laptop likely does, and that makes it hard to target the right content at the right time.”

 – Stewart Rogers, journalist, analyst, and speaker for VentureBeat

But privacy …

If it’s not blindingly obvious already, it should be: Privacy matters. Both your customers’ data and data about people who are not yet customers need to be treated with caution, respect, and care.

Staying legal is important. But just as important is not acting in ways that might be legal but are unethical and not explicitly permitted by the customers you are targeting.

It’s tempting to gather as much first-, second-, and third-party data as you can to improve your marketing. It’s wise, however, not to push the envelope on what’s acceptable.

And … cost & complexity are skyrocketing

Marketers are desperate for technology solutions that will solve their marketing challenges. And there are literally thousands of technology vendors who will gladly take your money and deliver their services.

The “Martech 5000”

The question is, however: How much should you spend? And, how many tools do you need?

We asked marketers how much of their technology budget they would spend to get full and complete visibility of their customers’ journey. The answer was shocking.

Six hundred and forty-seven marketers told us that they would spend a massive 60.2% of their technology budgets for a tool that would give them full visibility into their customers’ journeys.

The reality, of course, is that it would take much more.

To even approach the 100% visibility level, marketers would need a data management platform. They’d need to instrument everything they do, and everything their companies do — including the product — for data collection at every customer touchpoint. Marketers would also need to buy copious amounts of third-party web, social, demographic, and interest data to enrich their first-party data, plus tools and personnel to match, integrate, normalize, and de-duplicate. Then they’d need to invest heavily in technology and personnel to understand and map all the data.

Oh, and then — given that you might actually want to do something with all this information — marketers would need teams of people to focus on applying the lessons of the data to future marketing campaigns, tweaking and changing regularly as the data indicates.

In other words, this would likely take multiples of even the best-funded Fortune 1000 marketing organizations’ budgets. And even then, it wouldn’t include the pieces where a friend talks to a friend, a decision-maker messages a colleague, or any of the other millions of publicly invisible ways we make decisions.

But there is a better way.

Take the road less traveled: Amazon shows how to win

That gives Amazon unprecedented marketing power in both understanding its customers and in promoting its products and services to them. The result is obvious to anyone who has been watching retail in any way over the past decade:

Knowing your customer is marketing dialed to 11