Every click, every impression tells your story. The data is meticulously stored, giving marketers a keen insight into you and your behaviour patterns, helping them formulate a business marketing strategy that effectively targets you. It will tell them what you liked, what you didn’t. From basic information like which device you’ve used, what time you’ve accessed what content, which apps you use the most, to more evolved, decision-based information like how you interact with people and brands.

The data collected is used to predict audience behaviour, segregate them into buckets, build a business marketing strategy and then create content that would best speak to the targeted audience. The customised content aids in persuading the audience to respond to the communication. But is taking humans out of the equation the solution to successfully talking to them?

Let’s take 2020 for instance. Before the pandemic, everyone had their own digital routine. Their online personas would log in to social media apps on their way to work, would scroll through the news during the first meeting of the day, will window shop at lunch hour and may eventually surrender to another ‘impulse’ buy, by the end of the workday.

Once the lockdown ensued, life as we knew it, changed. Online behaviour, as we knew it, changed. With everyone working from home, people spent more time online, but spent less time on video calling sites, which didn’t exactly help marketers. Suddenly their business marketing strategy didn’t work. There was no commute, downtime reduced, and preferences took a back seat to the circumstances, drastically altering the spending patterns.

Marketers scrambled to adapt to this sudden change in the way content was consumed. They couldn’t use GPS positioning to serve ads, they couldn’t pinpoint the time the audience would be online on specific platforms. They had to find ways to reach them, but the data they’d collected so far didn’t help them understand their new behaviour and patterns. The old data was irrelevant as it now told a very different story than the ground reality.

While marketers struggled, new data continued to be collected with everyone’s new normal online persona. As the lockdown restrictions eased up and people gradually got back to work, once again, the behaviour changed. The data collected during the lockdown can’t adequately represent the audience and the data collected prior to the lockdown will not work either. Essentially, tools like programmatic buying and algorithmic segmentation revealed its glaring limitations during the pandemic, leading marketers and brands astray.

So, how do we create content that effectively speaks to the audience? It’s simple really. Talk to the people. Weave stories that hero the audience and their life’s journey, evoking a myriad of emotions. Create business marketing solutions that gives rise to communication which truly understands and represents the people’s pain points. This helps the audience build a connection with the brand that goes beyond the content. It builds a trusting relationship with them.

This is what we do at Centrick. We understand human behaviour, offline. We craft stories around people, their hopes, their pain, their joy. What do we use for data for then? We use data to measure the efficacy of campaigns and improve the implementation. The data shows us how people have reacted to the campaigns we’ve created. We use A/B testing to optimise the campaign and communicate the message effectively. We don’t use the data to manipulate the way people behave but use it to reach the people that matter most.

At Centrick, we believe that the audience is more than a set of data points and hence the best business marketing solutions cannot be programmatic or algorithmic. They should be emotional journeys where the brand and the audience grow together.