Canadian marketers have a multi-billion-dollar problem: Around ⅓ to ¼ of Canadian media spend is wasted.
That works out to about $4 billion of wasted media spend each year.
Too many campaigns waste precious dollars targeting the wrong audiences with disjointed efforts across digital, direct, and other channels.
Though data-driven marketing is the clear solution, Canadian marketers face a myriad of challenges that make data-driven marketing feel out of reach.
In this article, we dive into what exactly data-driven marketing is, the complexities of implementing data-driven marketing in Canada, the data-driven marketing solutions available, and the key to attainable and compliant data-driven campaigns.
What is Data-Driven Marketing?
Data-driven marketing is the systematic approach of using data to drive smarter marketing decisions and strategies.
This overarching approach helps ensure that marketing efforts are not just scattershot but carefully tailored based on empirical evidence. This often leads to higher conversion rates, better customer engagement, and more efficient use of marketing budgets.
Data-driven marketing solutions encompass a variety of tools and technologies designed to leverage data for marketing optimization. (We dive into these later.)
Why Data-Driven Marketing Is Challenging for Today’s Marketers
Data-driven marketing presents unique challenges for marketers, particularly in Canada due to several factors specific to the region’s market conditions, regulatory environment, and technological landscape.
Here are the main obstacles:
Media Fragmentation
The Canadian media landscape has seen significant fragmentation over recent decades, compelling advertisers to allocate increasing portions of their budgets to digital channels.
This shift was initially seen as a strategic move to capture the growing digital audience, but it has inadvertently contributed to several challenges. As demand for digital ad space surged, the market saw a rise in “nonsense sites” — platforms that either automate content generation or scrape it from legitimate sources. These sites, often lacking real human engagement, contribute extensively to the digital ad inventory, diluting the quality of potential ad placements.
This proliferation of low-quality digital spaces has fueled a rise in ad fraud. Ads are often not viewed by actual interested users but are instead caught in a web of non-human traffic. The result is a noticeable decline in conversion rates across various digital advertising channels, including search and display.
More Data But Fewer Insights
While today’s marketers have access to an unprecedented volume of data, turning this data into actionable insights is becoming increasingly complex.
The proliferation of big data and the persistence of data silos mean that valuable information often remains unconnected and underutilized. This issue is compounded by the need for substantial resources—not just in terms of technology but also specialized personnel—to effectively analyze and leverage this data.
The gap between data collection and insight generation can hinder marketers from making informed decisions.
Expanding Martech
The marketing technology landscape is rapidly expanding, offering powerful tools like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Data Clean Rooms, and programmatic advertising platforms like DSPs and SSPs. These technologies are designed to help marketers manage and utilize their data more effectively.
However, the complexity and cost associated with these technologies can be daunting, especially for smaller organizations. The investment in both financial and human resources needed to implement and maintain these systems is significant, posing a barrier to fully leveraging the potential of martech solutions. (More on this point later in the article!)
Identity and Addressability
The shift away from traditional identifiers like cookies and IP targeting is transforming the landscape of digital marketing. The decline of third-party cookies and the limitations in IP targeting have prompted marketers to explore new methods, such as identity graphs and proprietary ID solutions.
These alternatives, however, often result in marketers being confined to specific platforms and losing the flexibility to operate across multiple channels. This situation complicates efforts to create coherent and unified marketing strategies that are effective across different consumer touchpoints.
Privacy Concerns and Regulations
Privacy issues are among the top challenges facing Canadian marketers, driven by stringent government regulations like the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and consumer-driven movements like the use of ad blockers.
These developments force marketers to rethink how they collect, store, and utilize consumer data. Staying compliant with privacy laws while still engaging effectively with consumers requires a delicate balance, and the widespread use of ad blockers has made it increasingly difficult to reach audiences through traditional digital advertising methods.
The Data-Driven Marketing Solutions Available to Canadian Businesses
Marketers have a few different options to support their data-driven campaigns, each with their own advantages and challenges.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
A CDP collects and integrates customer data from various sources into a single, comprehensive database. This unified customer profile helps marketers personalize their marketing strategies across different channels.
However…
- The high cost of implementation and ongoing operation can be prohibitive, especially for smaller companies.
- The complexity of integrating diverse data sources and maintaining them can demand substantial IT resources.
- Compliance with stringent Canadian privacy laws like PIPEDA must be managed carefully, which adds another layer of complexity and potential legal risk.
- Additional tools are required for media activation.
Data Clean Rooms
These are secure environments where data from different sources can be anonymized and combined without exposing personally identifiable information (PII). Data clean rooms are useful for handling sensitive data and complying with privacy regulations, allowing marketers to merge datasets from various parties (like advertisers and publishers) to glean insights while upholding consumer privacy.
However…
- The setup of data clean rooms is inherently complex, requiring robust collaboration agreements and dedicated infrastructure.
- While they offer scalability, their effectiveness is often hampered by the necessity for multi-party agreements, which can be difficult to negotiate and manage.
- The high upfront costs associated with setting up the required infrastructure, along with substantial ongoing operational costs, make Data Clean Rooms a significant investment.
- They do not provide an identity resolution for media activation.
Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs)
DSPs enable advertisers to automate the purchasing of digital advertising, making it easier to manage multiple ad exchanges and data exchange accounts through a single interface. By using DSPs, marketers can buy ad space efficiently, optimize their ad spending based on real-time bidding, and better target their audiences using sophisticated algorithms that analyze extensive amounts of data.
However…
- Despite their efficiency, DSPs can be costly, incorporating various fees that may strain marketing budgets.
- Ad fraud can lead to spending on ineffective ad placements or non-human traffic.
Traditional Data Providers
Traditional data providers operate primarily through data licensing models, where businesses purchase access to datasets for use in their own analyses. This model allows companies to gain deep insights into various aspects of consumer behaviour.
However…
- Purchasing raw data can be prohibitive to marketing teams as it requires a considerable allocation of resources to turn the data into actionable insights.
Audience Prospecting Platforms
These platforms are designed to help brands identify and engage their next best customers (prospects) based on specific criteria such as demographics, behaviours, interests, and location. Marketers can use these platforms to uncover new audiences, refine targeting strategies, and improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
However…
- Most consumer audience targeting platforms are either integrated into DSPs like The Trade Desk, walled gardens like Meta, Google, or Amazon, or single channels like Canada Post. No matter how sophisticated the algorithms, each of these solutions only uses data and optimizes based on its channel, which does not deliver an omnichannel full-funnel approach and severely limits marketers’ ability to prospect.
intelligentVIEW: An Audience Prospecting Platform that Simplifies & Future-Proofs Data-Driven Marketing
As you can see, Canadian marketers need a simpler, more effective way to prospect and acquire customers without fragmentation, silos and inefficiencies.
intelligentVIEW is Canada’s only audience prospecting platform, providing unbiased cross-channel audience intelligence to fuel smarter acquisition strategies.
Simply put, intelligentVIEW is designed to help Canadian marketers find and acquire their next best customers without the limitations associated with walled gardens or siloed data.
It combines data, automation, segmentation and activation in one unified platform, delivering a true omnichannel, audience-first solution that no competitor in Canada has been able to match.
Privacy Compliant Identifiers
intelligentVIEW ensures privacy-compliant targeting by using a combination of six-digit postal codes and Identifiers for Advertisers (IFAs) to connect digital and offline data in a privacy-conscious manner. The six-digit postal codes serve as a common, persistent identifier that offers a granular level of targeting precision and addressability across media channels. IFAs, which are completely anonymous digital IDs controlled by the end user, are used to link digital identities to these postal codes without compromising individual privacy.
This system ensures that no personally identifiable information (PII) is transferred or exposed during the data handling process. IFAs are anonymized and encrypted both at rest and during transfer, securing the integrity of the data as it moves through various channels.
Omnichannel Data Connectivity
intelligentVIEW allows marketers to engage in true omnichannel marketing by seamlessly connecting digital and offline data. Bridging postal codes with mobile IDs enables marketers to target and activate campaigns across multiple channels more effectively than other platforms. This capability ensures that marketers can reach their audience wherever they are, be it online or offline, enhancing customer engagement and campaign ROI.
Cost Efficiency
intelligentVIEW is particularly cost-effective for Canadian marketers as it consolidates multiple marketing functions (data, automation, segmentation and activation) into a single platform, reducing the need for various separate tools. This integration minimizes the overhead costs associated with purchasing, implementing, and maintaining multiple data solutions and technologies. Additionally, its user-friendly design lessens the dependence on external consultants for data management and analysis, further cutting costs.
The Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing (When Executed Effectively)
intelligentVIEW makes compliant data-driven marketing attainable for Canadian marketers. With intelligentVIEW in your corner, you can benefit from all of the many advantages of true data-driven marketing.
- Optimized Media Spend: Data-driven marketing empowers businesses to target their media spend more accurately by identifying and reaching the right consumers. By analyzing consumer data and behaviour patterns, companies can pinpoint which segments are most likely to respond positively to specific campaigns.
- Improved Customer Insights: Data-driven marketing allows businesses to analyze information about customer behaviours, preferences, and trends, leading to more targeted and personalized marketing efforts.
- Enhanced Personalization: With detailed data, companies can tailor their messaging and offers to meet the specific needs and interests of individual customers. This level of personalization improves the customer experience, increasing engagement and loyalty.
- Increased Responsiveness: Data-driven marketing enables businesses to quickly detect changes in market conditions and consumer behaviour. This agility allows companies to adjust their strategies in real-time, staying ahead of competitors and better meeting customer needs.
- Improved Product Development: Insights gained from marketing data can inform product development, leading to the creation of products and services that are more closely aligned with customer demands and market gaps.
- Data-Backed Decision Making: Data-driven marketing moves businesses away from intuition-based decisions to more informed marketing decisions grounded in data. This reduces the risk of biases and assumptions, leading to more effective marketing strategies.
A Real-World Example of Data-Driven Marketing Solutions in Action
Papa John’s, a well-known pizza chain leveraged data-driven marketing to significantly boost its sales. Faced with the challenge of improving their marketing effectiveness, Papa John’s turned to intelligentVIEW to implement a strategic, data-centric approach.
By using intelligentVIEW, Papa John’s:
- Achieved a 6% increase in comparable store sales.
- Identified new segments to grow market share.
- Maximized media allocation between direct channels.
- Developed lookalike programs for each location.
Read the full Papa John’s case study here.
The Future of Data-Driven Marketing in Canada
The future of marketing is undoubtedly data-centric, and those who can effectively integrate this approach will gain a competitive advantage, achieving higher engagement, better conversion rates, and more robust sales figures.
As we move forward, marketers will need to continue evolving with the technological landscape, complying with ever-tightening regulations, and innovating in the ways they analyze, and act on data.
Want to see for yourself how data-driven marketing can be a game changer for your advertising campaigns? Get a sample report and explore the difference that deeper insights and targeted strategies can make.