Creating a marketing plan isn't simple. You have to research and understand the interests of your target customers, tap into current marketing trends and come up with a clever and captivating pitch to sell your products.
And having done all of this work, you may have a few victories but additional effort is required to have a real, measurable impact. This is where the strategic use of variables and the value of customer data truly comes into play.
Consider, for example, you're the marketing manager of a large clothing store. If your customers have an account at your store, chances are you have a pretty limited amount of information about them - their name, ID number, contact information and purchase history, perhaps. Sure, you can discern their age and gender from their ID number but that's about all you've got.
Now let's imagine that you're trying to target young, single females. Your research around this segment of the market is likely to reveal that these women are keen online shoppers and that they typically respond to sales and promotions. So you write a single marketing message to all of these customers with special offers for online shoppers and hope that your efforts bear fruit.
But this is where things get interesting, just because market trends tell you that this is what consumers will respond to, doesn't necessarily mean that it's what YOUR customers will respond to. By considering different variables in your marketing mix, you may discover that your target customers aren't actually avid online shoppers at all and that they prefer an in-store experience. These additional insights allow you to refine your messages so that you pinpoint different groupings of women based on their preferences and, in doing so, increase sales.
"It comes down to understanding your clients a little bit more," explains Effective Intelligence (EI) CEO, Julian Ardagh. We give our clients access to our extensive marketing database so they have all the variables they need to target the right customers and create a successful marketing strategy. The strategic use of these variables makes it easier to refine tactics, restructure offers or pricing and, in some cases, even abandon campaigns that aren't delivering the right message, he continues.
When you develop a marketing campaign and deploy it, you can only gauge the success of the campaign after the fact. But when you use variables strategically, you have the chance to test out your methodology and thinking before the campaign is launched.
This way, you can see if your ideas are actually suitable for the South African market and go back to the drawing board if you've missed the mark. While this approach does require an "extra step" it can save you from spending a significant amount money on marketing campaigns that would never have gotten off the ground. Not only will these insights reveal what you can do to keep existing customers happy, they will also outline what you could be doing to secure new customers.
If we go back to the clothing store example outlined above, as the marketing manager of this brand, you only have access to information around the behaviour of your existing customers. You probably have no clue how many other, similar, customers may be out there and how to get to them. If your marketing strategy is based on actionable insights and the right variables, you can effectively target these new market segments. This may mean developing several different campaign messages in order to effectively speak to your desired audience.
Effective Intelligence's approach combines the customer data you already have with a wealth of information from our marketing database. It's our job to figure out where your campaigns may be succeeding or failing so that you can tailor your messages to get the best response. How do we do this? We take a closer look at different variables across four strategic quadrants - insights, strategy, execution and analytics. Dissecting the data in this way enables us to align your goals with the best possible execution strategy.
Keen to learn more? Effective Intelligence's will be unpacking everything you need to know about variables and how to use them to achieve real results in future releases. But if you can't wait that long, you can sign up for its monthly newsletter, which is filled with tips and tricks to help you create relevant campaigns and generate more leads for your business.
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