The multitude of new channels and mediums for marketing has expanded the opportunities for companies to reach customers, but these channels are quickly becoming saturated. Businesses must now compete for attention of consumers constantly being bombarded with marketing messages to the point of becoming numb to them. Meaningful engagement with users is far more important than raw traffic generation, according to Matt Zilli (pictured), group vice president of product, segment and content marketing at Marketo Inc.

“There’s been this shift from the emotive storytelling side of marketing over to the data-driven operational side of marketing — the idea of ‘I can send out a million emails, and I know 100,000 people will open them and some subset of them will click on them. That’s an important piece of marketing today certainly, but I’d argue the needle has swung too far,” Zilli said.

Zilli spoke with Jeff Frick (@jefffrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studios in Palo Alto, California. They discussed what authentic engagement really means in today’s data-driven world. (* Disclosure below.)

Making use of all that data

Unlike the old days of television marketing where marketers took their best guess at a broad demographic range, marketers today are armed with more data than they know what to do with. The abundance of data on a given individual, however, creates an opportunity to go deeper into their engagements to improve their experience, Zilli explained.

“… We can now think about all this behavioral data, and what we learn about what somebody’s looking at on the web or on Facebook, or what their engaging with on Snapchat, that’s way more insightful for us to make an educated guess about what might provide somebody value,” Zilli said. “It really is this concept of constantly adapting the experience we’re creating for people, and it should just get better and better and better over time.”

Marketing organizations should go through the exercise of assuming infinite granularity to target a single specific user to gain more insights, according to Zilli, even if the company can’t deliver a personalized product.

“I think the biggest point we make is there is no excuse for not thinking that way today. There’s no excuse for not making strides toward delivering on an audience of one or a customer of one. … At the very least, we all have the technology at our fingertips that will let us choose how to engage with someone, what channel to engage with them, what timing and cadence to engage with them,” Zilli said. “So we can make progress even if we’re not at the point of using all of this information to deliver one perfect message.” 

Watch the complete video interview below. (* Disclosure: Marketo Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Marketo nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE