HP Digital Marketing Hub Helps Customers Harness Big Data

By Darryl K. Taft

Information pours into an organization at a furious pace; the volume and velocity is overwhelming. In today’s connected, digital and mobile landscape, there is no slowing down the creation of this data. Every 60 seconds, 204 million emails are sent, 100,000 Tweets are created, 48 hours of video are posted on YouTube and 2 million searches are performed on Google. A large subset of this data—for example, from social channels, contact centers and company Websites—is important to marketers because it can give clues as to who customers are, what are they looking for, and how they want to get that information and ultimately make a purchase.

To provide marketers with big data analytics to optimize real-time multichannel experiences across customer touch points, HP created the HP Digital Marketing Hub by tapping into innovations across different groups within the company. The Hub leverages HP’s big data expertise through the HP HAVEn platform, adding in science from HP Labs for analytics, all delivered on HP Converged Cloud. HAVEn stands for Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica, Enterprise Security and ‘n’ number of applications.

While the HP Digital Marketing Hub is HP’s entry into the digital marketing analytics space, it’s not the company’s first foray into digital marketing. Over the years, tens of thousands of companies have used HP TeamSite to create and deliver compelling Websites and experiences that increase customer engagement and conversions. HP Optimost has helped companies increase conversions to generate millions in revenue, and the company’s augmented-reality platform, Aurasma, is used by more than 20,000 customers for building brand awareness and stickiness.

The HP Digital Marketing Hub is an analytics platform that helps marketers increase customer conversions and loyalty by understanding the customer’s behavior in real time—answering not just what is happening across digital channels, but why it is happening—to build context that is missing from many of the current Web-reporting solutions today. The Hub is also an open approach that was launched with a partner ecosystem already in place—15 companies, including Experian, Kenshoo, Marketo, Deloitte Digital and Digital River among others.

In a perfect world, you would want to know who your customers are and when they’re making a buying decision. You would want to know which channels would reach these customers at exactly the right time, and you’d be able to position your product exactly the right way. Knowing all this would increase the likelihood of a closed sale, repeat business and a happy customer experience.

The digital marketing space is very fragmented and there are a lot of stand-alone black box solutions out there. But HP knows that you can’t force a company into one platform, nor can you ask it to rip out what it is already using, so HP worked with several ISVs and digital marketing agencies on co-development and integration programs for the HP Digital Marketing Hub. This allows customers to preserve their investments in marketing apps.

The HP Digital Marketing Hub turns multi-channel data into real-time customer insight. By combining the latest analytics with an intuitive dashboard, the Hub uses powerful algorithms to deliver instant, actionable insight to marketers. Data from many different sources, including the Web, email, search engine marketing (SEM), CRM, purchase systems and call centers, are automatically combined and analyzed in real time to form coherent multichannel customer insights. This eliminates the need to shift through multiple reports or build complex models to get answers, as everything is delivered through a single dashboard.

The HP Digital Marketing Hub produces insights into individual customers at scale and in real time, without the need of manual intervention. Answers come instantly, not weeks later. HP uses algorithms geared toward marketing questions, so digital marketers get better answers to the fundamental questions that drive marketing results, such as who are the best customers, what customer attributes drive conversions, what type of content drives desired customer behavior and how do multiple touch points combine to drive conversions.

The HP Digital Marketing Hub lets marketers quickly identify the key customer attributes that drive desired customer behavior. Users can define the key performance indicator (KPI) that matters most to them, and the Hub then takes multichannel customer data to quickly identify distinct customer segments, their conversion levels and the key attributes within each segment that drives behavior. As more data is added and analyzed in real time, these segments are adjusted to become more accurate.

The HP Digital Marketing Hub lets marketers increase ROI from their marketing budgets by optimizing their marketing spend. By using powerful algorithms to analyze multichannel data, the Hub pieces together disparate customer interactions to form a coherent customer journey, so marketers understand how different channels influence or lead to customer conversions. Using this insight, marketers can adjust their spend to optimize their marketing strategy for greater conversions.