Tealium & Digital Velocity: Our POV
We recently attended Digital Velocity, a Tealium user conference held in San Diego. Back with fresh insights, we wanted to share our POV on the company’s latest software and how brands use Tealium to create rich customer profiles and deliver more relevant marketing campaigns.
What is Tealium?
Tealium is a software company mostly known for its enterprise tag management software, Tealium IQ. As of now, Tealium IQ supports over 1,000 tags out of the box, which is perfect for brands that have either complex tags or a high volume of tags to support.
First, it’s important to know that Tealium’s mascot is a giant blue beast, pictured here with me and Danielle Savin, LYONSCG’s director of digital strategy.
OK, back to Tealium. AudienceStream is Tealium’s other popular product and builds off Tealium IQ by letting you combine, enhance, segment, and leverage any data that passes through Tealium IQ. AudienceStream is a great tool for customer unification.
For example, with AudienceStream you can combine a mobile visit with a desktop visit for the same user (combine data), count their total purchases across devices (enhance), isolate your customers according to loyalty (segment), and then push all this data to your email provider to send specific marketing (leverage).
More on data unification in a bit.
Tealium’s third and newest product is DataAccess, which lets you push the data in real time to business intelligence or data warehouse platforms.
How Does LYONSCG Use Tealium?
As a Tealium partner, we’ve implemented and leveraged its tools for clients for a few years now. Most of our clients use Tealium IQ, but we’ve happily observed growing momentum behind AudienceStream and could easily see the same for DataAccess in the coming year. As Tealium adoption grows, and our clients’ marketing programs mature, we’ll explore new ways to leverage the power of AudienceStream while continuing to deploy a massive amount of tags through Tealium IQ.
How Do Brands Benefit from Tealium’s Customer Unification?
Remember the story from a few years back about Target identifying and marketing to a pregnant woman before her family even knew about the pregnancy?
My original reaction to this story was, “That’s really cool (albeit a tad creepy), but it’s expensive to combine all those disparate data sources, and without a silver bullet marketing campaign that can leverage the combined data, it’s cost prohibitive for most brands.”
Nowadays, it’s easier and more affordable to unify consumer data from a variety of traffic channels and devices, and AudienceStream is one tool that helps you do that. With omnichannel data hurdles out of the way, you can create richer customer profiles and deliver more relevant marketing campaigns. For example, you can stop showing desktop ads or sending abandoned cart emails to mobile purchasers.
What Brands Should Use Tealium?
Tealium IQ is great for brands that have either a large amount of tags or both complex and crucial tags to implement, such as Omniture. Some brands might not experience the complexity that requires Tealium IQ’s tag management muscle, but transitioning to Tealium IQ and AudienceStream at the same time could be a good move. DataAccess is great for brands that need a clean way to collect, enrich, and feed data into a business intelligence tool, such as Tableau or Birst, or into a data warehouse.
Tealium’s tools should be considered for any brand’s customer data infrastructure needs, and their mascot should be considered for children’s birthday celebrations.
James McDonald is a senior digital consultant on the LYONSCG Digital Marketing team. As analytics team lead, James focuses on aggregating and mining data for insights to guide digital strategies and optimization. He has over five years of experience in digital analytics, strategy, and marketing. He will gladly join your trivia team if you ever need an additional player.
