• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 7, 2016

Marketers waking up to a world of connected consumers find as many challenges as there are types of devices that pull in mounds of data. It can make media buying and targeting custom messages tricky.

In an attempt to build a stronger relationship with customers, marketers are building percussion marketing campaigns supported by data. Some choose to put data management platforms (DMPs) at the heart of custom marketing strategies to act as the brain. In fact, 73% of marketers now run or test precision-marketing programs. Nearly 60% have adopted a DMP, a rate 32% higher than their low-maturity counterparts, according to research from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Krux.

The report -- Put Data Management At The Core of 1:1 Marketing, released Thursday -- analyzes precision marketing trends and fallacies, the use of data to gain insights and inform marketing actions, from point of sale and email, to addressable TV or search.

Since marketers really don't know consumers well enough to deliver a really personalize experience, they need to rely on data. "There are some barriers that make it impossible from cost and strategy," said Jon Suarez-Davis, CMO and CSO at Krux. "The industry is close, but when you think about the cost associated with the non-working and the working media, we're clearly not there yet."

It's really about going from mass-market targeting to adding multiple messages that make the experience more relevant, Suarez-Davis said.

"The industry is moving to implement things like dynamic creative, so you will get a different message than I would," he said. "Now that companies have better data, we need to balance efficiency and effectiveness."

Call it one-on-one, data-driven, or precision marketing -- in order to meet consumer expectations and drive growth, companies need to transform their organizations with new playbooks and intelligent systems that deliver relevant and exceptional brand experiences throughout the consumer journey.

Marketers moving to precision marketing are most likely to rank key customer success indicators such as improving customer retention and boosting customer loyalty among their top three priorities for their media buying programs.

Some 81% of marketers want to experiment and learn from precision-marketing programs. More importantly, 55% of high-maturity marketers report that even if a campaign falls short of objectives, if it led to insights to improve future efforts, it was still viewed as a ‘success’ within the organization.