A new year calls for new things – resolutions, methodologies, innovations, inventions; and while the marketing landscape is flooded with all of these, it is important to develop new perspectives on old technology.
The tag management system, once relegated to basic word association for SEO purposes, is evolving into a key strategic tool for the adoption of digital intelligence, and the practice for delivering action-based customer analytics.
As personalization initiatives only become more saturated with data and information, it is imperative for marketers and brands to recognize the power of tag management in the future. In fact, 51% of software investment solutions for personalization initiatives are expected to revolve around tag management, according to Forrester’s Digital Experience Technology and Delivery Priorities report.
Tag management systems are important; or as James McCormick, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, puts it quite simply:
“Tag management is the most boring name for the perhaps the single most impactful practice firms need to master to succeed at any digital engagement program that needs to scale — never mind its importance to the efficacy of digital marketing efforts.”
Why?
Well, as McCormick says, tag management has evolved to activate digital customer insights.
“The fact is that today’s strategic tag management practices deliver essential digital intelligence value by enhancing data and analytics,” says McCormick. “Scaling digital intelligence with tag management is achieved by progressively maturing tagging practice along four sequential stages of tag management adoption.”
Over the past year, tags — such as pixels, image tags, or JavaScript code — have arisen as the primary method for deploying and managing the technology and exchange of data within digital touchpoints (e.g., website, mobile app or social media).
However, in aggressively expanding tag management systems, many brand and marketers, McCormick says, fall victim to the expensive and error-prone manual tag management.
If a brand or marketer is looking to succeed with a tag management system, McCormick suggests a four-stage process:
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Stage 1: Improving operational management of tags
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Stage 2: Using flexible multi-stakeholder digital data management
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Stage 3: Scaling digital analytics and insights across the enterprise
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Stage 4: Optimizing marketing and customer interactions
“To succeed, digital intelligence must incorporate capabilities that accommodate the collection, manipulation, and distribution of large volumes of data across a broad range of data types,” says McCormick. “Tag management facilitates this need and enables the availability of safe yet high-quality data for analysis.”
Tag management scales digital analytics and insights-driven customer engagements digital intelligence demands the maximization of the value of digital customer analytics and data.
“Attaining this goal means analysts and their tools must convey insights to business stakeholders to drive real-time decisions,” McCormick says. “Tag management ensures that analysis capabilities are not confined to technical staff, analysts, and technical siloes, and it scales digital intelligence across the enterprise and businesses.”
This intelligence allows brands to ensure real-time optimization of marketing and customer engagement activities via native functionality, such as data mining, testing, and targeting, to connect analysis to the delivery of content and promotions.
“A successful digital intelligence strategy has a sound tag management program at its heart,” says McCormick. “To leverage tag management for scalable, real-time, intelligence-driven customer engagement, [brands] must work with their marketing and business technology partners.”
