– Avinash Pattabhiram Iyer (3TP 2012)
In today’s economy where digital is a default, organizations have to perpetually reinvent themselves to stay relevant to their customers or face the threat of extinction. The same holds true for any function within an organization. Let’s take marketing. If we operate the way we did 10 years ago – sending flyers and brochures and sitting by the phone expecting business from the prospects – where will we end up in a few weeks’ time? It’s obvious that we would no longer be effective in our strategies and would be losing ground to our competition – inch by inch.
So, what should we do to drive growth, and stay relevant? Embrace new wave/digital technologies.
Let’s look at some of the ways we could use analytics to reinvent marketing and leverage it to enable organizations to not just ‘leapfrog’ competition but ‘pole vault’ it.
- Building a Customer Profile
The primary objective of your business is to create a more disciplined and comprehensive customer profile. However, customer segmentation may not be as simple. Employing just a demographic label will not produce the desired outcomes. While, analytics can help define specific characteristics for each segment, the idea is to deliver personalized, more relevant messages to customers.
To attain a holistic view of the customer, and predict their future behavior, several industry-specific clustering parameters are available, which include relevant data on attitudes, purchasing behavior, lifestyles, and interests. Mapping analytics is one such tool which uses customer data, analytical techniques, and lifestyle cluster data to provide an accurate description of consumers. This further encourages identifying key communication strategies for each segment.
Take the case of Porsche’s approach to target marketing. To target an upscale and elite audience, the company uses two variables—descriptive and behavioral elements. Descriptive includes geographic, psychographic, and demographic elements, while behavioral takes into account individual benefits, usage, and responsiveness to brands. Combined, these elements help the company engage existing customers with relevant and personalized messages. As a result, customer profiling boosts penetration rate analysis to better comprehend the market potential of products—improving response rates and ROI.
- The value of explanatory data analytics in driving growth
The insights of “why” your marketing is driving certain types of results and the correlation between these insights can help you identify solutions to change course, in case the predicted outcomes are undesirable. Using such insights, you can also bridge information silos and enhance the value of marketing spend for your organization.
By using data visualization to present data in various scenarios, explanatory data analytics helps you understand the data better. With predictive analysis, you follow a linear path that assumes only one outcome. Explanatory data analytics, on the other hand, helps you visualize different outcomes based on changes in the scenario. It uses variables that are directly or indirectly under your control to help you zero in on new opportunities or drive superior results on your marketing campaigns. Let’s consider two use cases for explanatory data analytics.
Use case 1: Increasing lunch-time sales for a restaurant chain
Consider a steakhouse chain that wants to increase sales. Let’s say they have detailed sales data on what they are selling the most, in what quantities, and at what time. Using analytics, they come up with the hypothesis that the best way to increase afternoon sales is to target couples during lunch time. So they tweak the menu options and run a campaign to target couples, but sales do not increase as expected. How can an explanatory data analytics model help in this situation? Using exploratory analytics on the right data, the company can find the “why?” behind the lack of increase in sales – i.e. most women do not like the presentation of the steaks and the machismo messaging. So, the steakhouse comes to the conclusion that to improve afternoon sales by targeting couples, they need better presentation and messaging that is more gender inclusive.
- AR and VR: A Content Revolution
When it comes to delivering an immersive brand experience, AR and VR stand at the helm of technology innovations globally. In a study conducted by YuMe and Neilsen, three content formats were studied: flat 360-degree video, traditional 2-D, and VR. And as expected, the VR format was found to engage the audience for almost 34% longer and prompted a 27% higher reaction. As the cost of the technology decreases and its penetration grows, the pressure on content creators to adapt to the format increases. However, one of the major roadblocks in the burgeoning AR and VR market is the lack of high-quality content.
The Challenge in Creating Content
In spite of AR and VR taking off in a big way in the content marketing space, content creators find themselves struggling to create relevant high-quality experiences owing to operational challenges pertaining to devices and platforms. As a result, in spite of the great leaps in device technology and experiences native to these devices, it is almost a rarity to find AR and VR driven content with universal application or usage.
IAM360, a Hong-Kong based startup, is on a mission to solve this pertinent issue. Their plan is to democratize VR content creation by allowing smartphone users to create 360-degree stories. Users can capture their surroundings using their phone cameras, which can be consequently played and shared with VR headsets.
VR systems to elevate the way education is imparted are also being developed. Immersive VR Education has come up with an app called Lecture VR, which simulates a lecture hall and introduces special effects, otherwise unimaginable in a traditional classroom setup. The Google Expeditions Pioneer Program entails teams from Google visiting schools around the world, equipping and enabling teachers and educators to take students on VR trips.
- SEO : What the future holds
In times to come, it is clear that keeping pace and integrating the latest SEO trends is vital to your website strategy. Other than these basic formulas, trends such as accelerated mobile pages (AMP), artificial intelligence (AI), and user-experience optimization, personal branding and iteration have to be taken into account for enhancing and capitalizing on SEO capabilities. AMPs allow consumers to load pages instantly at a reduced data rate on their mobile phones. An example of AI being used is Google’s RankBrain, which enhances the search results and provides only relevant information to the search engine users.
It goes without saying that your web pages need to be highly user-friendly, well-designed, and engaging to increase your website traffic. Moreover, the use of personal branded URLs and ‘short branded links’ increases the content iteration – in turn, raising rankings across SERPs.
Conclusion:
The success of an industry player to capture customers’ imagination and the wallet share will heavily depend on the ability to capitalize on digital technologies and judicious combination.
Investment in data analytics isn’t as simple as investing in a tool and deploying it on your datasets. To get the most out of your investment, it’s important to change the way you explore data – in sync with evolving consumer interests and buying habits. With customers routinely demanding personalized experiences, increasing the use of explanatory data analytics can help you extract greater value from your existing predictive analytics investments.
At the same time, a unified approach to brand messaging plays a critical role in this – all organizational units speaking in one voice and tone across channels helps make the most of the company’s customer reach with deeper, more meaningful engagement.
