Digital analytics primarily supports functions of customer and prospect marketing. When it comes to the goals of digital analysis, it literally mirrors the mission of modern marketing. But what exactly is today's version of marketing all about?

Honestly, we've been talking about this for years. And years. We ALL know it's what we should be doing and conceptually it's very simple, but practically, it has been very hard to achieve. Why?

Even with great web analytics, there have always been critical missing insights, which meant we didn't know for certain what the next-best-interaction for each customer was at any point in time. In addition, the development of insights and the use of analytics to define high-propensity audience segments has been distinctly slow and batch-driven in nature, delaying relevant delivery of targeted interactions. So we may get the message right, but we probably don't deliver it in a timely, consistent way, which has a dramatic impact on customer responsiveness and marketing effectiveness.

So in today's connected, always-on, highly opinionated world, we need to be a little sharper in meeting our customer's basic expectations, never mind surprising, delighting, and impressing them. While the concept of customer-centricity continues to increase in importance, improving our analytical approach to support this premise is vital.

SAS recognizes today's modern marketing challenges with digital and customer analytics. It is our mission to enable marketers to benefit from approachable and actionable advanced analytics to make more powerful decisions within today’s complex and interconnected business environments. That sounds great, right? I sense some of you reading this are raising an eyebrow of suspicion at this very moment.

Practically speaking, we want to show you exactly what that means. On March 29th, 2016, we aired episode one of a two-part webcast series, and it is now available for on demand viewing:

SAS for Digital Analytics: Introduction & Advancing Segmentation [Part 1]

We genuinely hope the webcast provided a proper introduction to how SAS participates in the space of digital analytics for data-driven marketing, and please come back in a couple of weeks when we will post Part 2 in this series entitled: SAS for Digital Analytics: Personalization & Attribution [Part 2]

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