By Kunal Aman – Head of Marketing & Communications-SAS India & Japan
Marketers have possibly endured the most trying few months of their career: COVID 19 either set off panic buying or completely suppressed demand, lockdowns brought business activity to a grounding halt and supply chains were left disrupted. Marketers had to deal with extreme uncertainty, throw out their existing plans and pivot to completely new digital strategies. CMOs found themselves prioritizing safety, brand strategy, hurriedly shifting marketing mixes and welcoming agile planning with open arms.
In times of uncertainty, scenario planning is of essence. And a crucial ingredient for effectively planning scenarios is data. Used right, it offers a doorway to current trends, avoids costly errors in decision making and aids in charting a way forward. Moreover, much like setting a cat amongst the pigeons, the pandemic brought forth an intense focus on measuring marketing’s impact. Trying circumstances often mean that the axe tends to fall on marketing budgets. Used wisely, data can act as your shield against this axe, making the case for being analytically driven stronger than ever before.
Here’s 5 ways how being a ‘analytically driven marketer’ will help in navigating the ‘coronial’ era:
1. Tracking & Responding to Changing Customer Preferences:
Marketers are seeing significant changes in consumer habits – for example the sharp increase in consumption of online news, shifts toward remote learning and high consumption of streaming services meant brands such as YouTube had to temporarily reduce video quality to reduce strain on networks.
Some of these habits will be temporary. Others however, may reveal themselves to be long lasting. Analytics can play a key role not only in tracking consumer preferences and behaviors, but also in enabling a rapid response to such opportunities or threats.
2. Personalization:
Thanks to COVID 19, customer journeys have changed. Yet, every touchpoint throughout the journey still remains an opportunity to engage the customer. Marketers will need to use the new wave of information coming through Digital channels to better personalize messages and offers. Adding Analytical firepower to your marketing stack can transform digital data into predictive, customer-focused insight. Using that insight to guide customer interactions, making contextual decisions in real-time that result in highly personalized, relevant messages can set your brand apart.
3. 360 Attribution & Capturing Channel performance:
Consider the many ways that a customer encounters your brand – organic search results, display ads, virtual events, social media etc. One thing is for sure – consumer journeys are far from linear. They can occur across multiple platforms and devices. The problem is that organizations are often constrained to channel-limiting decisions regarding their media investment allocations. You need to be able to account for how customers move across inbound and outbound channels. Analytics applied in the area of marketing attribution helps you analyze the impact and quantify business value of marketing interactions across channels to help make the best marketing investment decisions.
4. Spending Marketing Dollars Wisely
Marketers can use predictive analytics to project-specific business goal completion based on the performance metrics of a current campaign. Performance Reporting gets automated and simplified too. So, instead of axing marketing budgets, take a cleaver approach by selecting programs that may generate the least ROI. Having this sort of information at hand lends credibility to marketing and could go a long way in conversations with your friends in finance.
5. Gaining a 360-degree view of the customer:
Ultimately, data captured by marketing analytical suites isn’t about pages and clicks; it’s about people – everything they see and do, and everywhere they go. The best ones capture the complete online behavior of customers at a detailed level and can marry it with existing offline customer data sources – e.g., promotional, demographic and purchase-based information – to provide a complete picture of the customer. By combining these typically disparate data sources into a unified view of the customer, you’ll gain valuable insight into a customer’s needs.
Remember, while it might be a difficult time for marketers and brands, the customer out there is as demanding as ever. They have dual expectations of businesses: Understand me as an individual and protect my privacy, and yet, treat me differently basis where I am and who I am. That’s possible only if you have a 360-degree view.
Marketing has always been an art and a science. We will need to think hard—and differently—about how the consumer in this new era will think, feel and act. Clearly, harnessing our imagination & creativity, is the need of the day. That’s the ‘art’ we marketers are known for. But given the unprecedented nature of the pandemic and the profound changes it is causing; analytics may just be the science that marketers can rely on to ensure our customer relationships outlast the virus.
