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New partnerships in data-driven marketing continue to come fast and furious. For example, the recent announcement from IBM and Facebook. The agreement integrates data analytics and the IBM marketing cloud, which is trying to make inroads in the marketing cloud landscape, with Facebook’s advertising ecosystem. It’s intended to support personalized marketing at scale for some of the biggest brands in the world. But what will integration of these platforms mean in pragmatic terms to chief marketing officers and their teams when it comes to personalization?

Facebook, of course, delivers ad capabilities in programs like Custom Audiences to a hefty ecosystem of companies based on its 1.4 billion users. On the other side of the equation, IBM’s marketing cloud has the potential to contribute sophisticated data analytics to help brands better target Facebook audiences. Now, according to the two companies, retailers will have more and better data on customers and will be able to send them better-targeted and higher-value ads with more compelling messages on Facebook, as well as use insights from data in marketing across other channels.

However, is better ad targeting sufficient to achieve one-to-one personalization? The partnership will clearly give marketers more information about customers, but targeting is still based on microsegments, albeit potentially more finely tuned. Ideally, campaign and offer customization should take place at the individual level to ensure the greatest relevance across all channels — online and offline — and at every point in the customer journey.

In research on multichannel personalization, however, Forrester analysts concluded that personalization is still primarily limited to single or double channels. And as consumers are spending more time in emerging channels, marketers need to track and deliver experiences that are contextually relevant both to the channel and to the point in the journey. The IBM and Facebook partnership, as potent as it may be, addresses just part of this challenge.

According to Forrester’s study, 77 percent of brands use some form of personalization in one or two channels. Yet only 13 percent of these companies said they were applying extensive personalization across multiple channels in part because of difficulties effectively linking customer data.

[ Source :- Emarketingandcommerce ]