Cape Town, 09 Apr 2015
Are you a data-driven marketer? Can you confidently say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, which components are bringing you the greatest return along the specific stages of your customer journey? Are you in complete control of personalising the delivery of messages to a tailored audience, across multiple channels?
If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, then you are a modern, very sought-after data-driven marketer earning millions of rands for your company each year, without feeling any pressure from your CEO and board of directors. If you gave an honest answer of "no", you are among the majority of marketers who feel overwhelmed by the extraordinary change due to the "Internet of things".
Effective Intelligence, South Africa's leading marketing and analytical data solutions provider, has assisted most of the largest consumer-facing companies in South Africa through formulating profitable data-led strategies and tactics that work. How does it do this? By placing your customer at the heart of your marketing efforts, because your success (and Effective Intelligence's) is dependent on it.
Customer engagement is here to stay. Fuelled by data-driven insights and strengthened through analytics, engagement is the new barometer of current and future customer value. In a time of brand overexposure and technology proliferation, marketing has quickly evolved from brand "push" to conversation "pull" - the latter driven by the customer. Good conversations last and help sustain relationships beyond transactions.
The following areas need to be considered for an impactful marketing strategy designed to produce results:
1. Data collection and management
a. Is your data spread across silos within your organisation?
b. Do you know what customer data matters and drives the desired behaviours?
c. Are you tracking your marketing campaigns and appending these data variables to customer profiles?
d. Do you have quantifiable metrics in place (linked to your company's objectives) linked to every marketing initiative?
2. Customer analytics and intelligence
a. Have you segmented your customers based on the data and developed informative, practical personas?
b. Do you know what the lifetime value is of the customer in each segment?
c. Do you know what your most valuable customers 'look' like - and how to create more of them?
d. Are you aware of what your customers really value from you (besides product or service) - in exchange for their loyalty?
3. Strategy and customer experience planning
a. Have you mapped out your customer's journey with your product or service?
b. Are you clear about where, when, and why customers interact with your product or service, and the level of importance of each interaction?
c. When you plan your customer acquisition and retention strategies, do consider both immediate and longer term tactical elements?
d. Does your marketing strategy and tactical execution reflect - and adapt to - the evolving needs of your customers at different stages in their relationship with your brand?
4. Integrated, multi-channel initiatives
a. Do your marketing campaigns and programmes use the channels that are most relevant to your customers? How do you know?
b. Have you developed a channel attribution scale so that you know which channels have a greater influence on desired customer behaviour, and perform better relative to others?
c. Do you have a well-defined lead nurturing strategy in place?
d. Do you plan regular (eg, semi-annual) 'deep dives' on your marketing metrics and other customer data to evaluate engagement progress over time, rather than just at a specific, campaign-based level?
5. And finally...
a. Based on data-driven insights and awareness of your customers, as well as integrated marketing measurement, do you know precisely how/where you would spend an extra dollar of your budget to get the maximum return on your investment?
Effective Intelligence is South Africa's leading full-service marketing analytics and data solutions service provider. It creates value for its clients through integrated, multi-channel marketing programmes that harness the power of data, technology, analytics and creative excellence.
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