Have marketers been using the wrong metrics all along? (Interview)
Ben Darlington, CTO at Fospha, tells .rising where digital marketing is headed and why the mathematician is the new creative genius.
Ben Darlington, CTO at Fospha, tells .rising where digital marketing is headed and why the mathematician is the new creative genius.
Here Ben Darlington, CTO at Fospha, tells .rising where digital marketing is headed and why the mathematician is the new creative genius.
How would you summarise the current digital marketing landscape?
It isn’t enough to push a generic message to a broad audience and see who converts anymore. You need to look for the right way to interact with an individual customer at the right time. And it’s imperative that we find new ways to do this: acquisition costs are increasing; the huge number of digital channels is getting more expensive to manage and integrate; predictive analytics technology hasn’t really delivered on the promise of real-time; and marketers now have access to a tsunami of data without getting real, actionable insights. Meanwhile, customers still abandon websites in huge numbers without converting.
Sounds familiar, but what can we do about it?
What’s been missing is the hard science and hard numbers that turns customer behaviour into actionable responses. Online customer experience is much more than well designed pages. What about how they interacted, their behaviour? If you knew this in real-time you’d change page content for every visitor to convert more.
In ecommerce, for example, it’s incredibly common for someone to go to a site and add things to their basket, with no intention of making a purchase. Knowing that this is happening means you can intervene to change their whole shopping journey, all the way up to the checkout.
And you will want different responses for different customers – so, if someone is clearly just adding random items, when they hit the checkout page to review, you can give them more ideas. That way, you’re both developing engagement and introducing items they might not have found themselves.
But if someone is at the moment they’re finally about to enter their credit card details and you go “are you sure?” – that’s the worst possible outcome.
Our technology helps you identify which person you’re dealing with, so you can act accordingly. At root, what we do is empower the digital marketer: we provide access to a platform that not only gives 100 times more data, but also shows you how to apply it to convert more.
That sounds like a silver bullet for digital marketing – is it really possible?
There are some sophisticated maths behind it. If you’re using conventional analytics you’ll get 15 bits of static information per page; we’ll capture 1,500 bits of dynamic information per page, and make it meaningful – all in real time.
Whilst the technology is complex, implementing it is really easy, which is what you’d expect from the latest breed of SaaS products. The data gets digital marketers to the next generation of understanding their customers by building up profiles and insights on consumer behaviour in the moments they exist, not their historical attributes.
Great, it’s possible – is it desirable, then?
Visitors welcome a customised and responsive website, personalised just for the moment when they are shopping. This technology is really no different to using body language, but for websites. In fact, it’s more anonymous. There’s no difference between what we do and the shop assistant watching you in the shop. A good shop assistant will spot you at exactly the moment you’re unsure and will help you.
Moving to an age of behavioural metrics will help digital marketers to adapt and anticipate customer needs, converting more – truly in real-time.
The shop assistant analogy is good. Some web experiences are the equivalent of the assistant launching at you with a “can I help?” the moment you enter the shop, but when you need help they are nowhere to be seen. Bad for retail, but the digital equivalent is worse.